When Kimberly Kleoppel envisioned the birth of her fourth baby, she pictured warm lighting and a birthing tub.
She wanted it to go a lot like the birth of her third baby. Kleoppel delivered a girl at New Birth Company in Overland Park, Kansas, a natural, freestanding birth center for low-risk pregnancies, last spring.
“You walked in, they had soft music playing. There was a queen-size bed that was all made up,” Kleoppel said. “It was a family birthing suite with a huge bathtub and really beautiful pillars.”
For Kleoppel, the non-clinical, home-like setting was a breath of fresh air.
“It’s a very peaceful and calming environment, and it just felt more like, ‘Okay, maybe this is how it’s supposed to be when you’re having a baby,’” she said. Kleoppel said her first two babies were born at a hospital and both experiences were traumatic. She felt rushed to deliver at the hospital and like she didn’t have the chance to let her body go through labor naturally.
“It feels very baby in, baby out … and natural birth is really different,” Kleoppel said. “Nobody looks at you like, ‘Hey, this isn’t happening fast enough.”
To Kleoppel, a birth center felt like the perfect middle ground between a home birth and a hospital birth.
For her fourth pregnancy, Kleoppel chose to go to New Birth Company again. She said she was set on delivering there, but about 8 months into her pregnancy, she got a shocking call from her midwife. New Birth Company was closing.
“She said that the original closure date was supposed to be Aug. 22nd, and I was due on the 30th,” Kleoppel said.
Birth centers like New Birth Company take a holistic approach to pregnancy and childbirth. They still involve a lot of the same screening practices and have medical equipment on deck for an emergency, but they try not to intervene with the natural labor process by doing things like breaking a person’s water, inducing labor or administering an epidural.
Out-of-hospital-births, delivering at home or in birth centers, are becoming more and more popular nationwide. Birth center workers say their services are in high demand, but because of low reimbursement from Medicaid and private insurance companies, many are struggling to stay open.
THE CLOSURE of New Birth Company left Kleoppel scrambling.
“I kind of just like broke down and started crying,” she said. “Me not pregnant, pretty logical. Me pregnant, all bets are off. And I think a lot of women can probably relate to that.”
Initially, Kleoppel said she hoped she’d deliver early before New Birth Company closed so she wouldn’t have to change her birth plan. She thought going to the hospital didn’t seem feasible.
Kleoppel said when she gave birth the first time, she was induced at a hospital because her blood pressure was high. She said when she got an epidural, it caused her blood pressure to fall drastically and she and the baby started having heart issues.
