The Chicago Maternity Center Story
1976, 60 minutes
For more than 75 years, the Chicago Maternity Center provided safe home deliveries for Chicago mothers. However, when modern medicine's attitude toward home birth changed and funding from Northwestern University declined in 1974, the center was forced to close. This film interweaves the history of the center with the stories of a young woman about to have her first baby and the center's fight to stay open in the face of the corporate takeover of medicine.
Read "Looking back on THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY" by Gordon Quinn, Suzanne Davenport and Jenny Rohrer.
The Chicago Maternity Center Story screens at Doc Films this Sunday
November 16, 2011
Doc Films' 10-week Kartemquin retrospective continues this Sunday, November 20 at 7pm with The Chicago Maternity Center Story & Women's Voices: The Gender Gap. In celebration of Kartemquin's 45th anniversary, The University of Chicago's Doc Films is bringing the art of documentary storytelling back to the place where our history all began…
Attending this event and leading the discussion after the screening will be:
Suzanne Davenport and Jerry Blumenthal, filmmakers;
Kay Harvey, doula and ICTC member;
- Made by
- Jerry Blumenthal
- Suzanne Davenport
- Sharon Karp
- Gordon Quinn
- Jennifer Rohrer
- Assistance
- Teena Webb
- Susan Delson
- Vickie Cooper
- Betsy Martens
- Richard Schmeichen
- Judy Hoffman
- Peter Kuttner
"It’s not a little distressing to see that the debates then remain the same, only with the costs more devastating. The documentary—so energetic, so right—provides heartening evidence of efforts by activists, filmmakers, and mothers to fight back."
—Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters
Comments
November 7, 2010 - 6:21pm
Andrew Brown
Sounds like a great place and very important to the community.
January 30, 2011 - 3:44am
Paul Mollica
I posted this on Facebook with a link to your site -
Saw this at a screening at the GSFC today, with many of the participants present (including the mother pictured here). A skilled polemic from 1976 that nakedly named the corporate and "philanthropic" interests that killed a Maxwell Street home-birth clinic (run from 1931 to 1974 by a pioneering obstetrician, Dr. Beatrice Tucker). Too vivid for television even today, DVDs can be purchased from Kartemquin.
February 10, 2011 - 8:45am
David Joel
That's my wife Susan holding the 'Support Home Delivery" sign in the promo photo.. Actually she is not recognizable to me-- but she says she remembers making that sign so I suppose it is indeed her!
August 12, 2011 - 3:02pm
Anonymous
Both I and my foster brother were CMS Homebirth deliveries in 1972. I had a Homebirth in 2008 after great struggles to find a homebirth attendant. Homebirths Rock!
January 20, 2012 - 8:57am
Anonymous
i am currentaly pregnant and i would love to have my baby at home, but i would rather go to a hospital and deliever my baby. i hope that it is a boy too... :)
February 1, 2012 - 10:10pm
Mary Amari
I was one of the nurses that worked there. I became familiar with the center as a student nurse and was employed there after graduating from nursing school. Dr. Tucker was a remarkable individual that truly believed in birth as a natural process, that involved the family as an intregal part of the birthing experience. Birth was an incredible miracle not with the wailing, drugs and paternalism of the hospital experience that I saw in my OB experience. As a young nurse it was remarkable and as a young woman an eye opener to the beauty and miracle of birth. Thank you, Maternity Center and Dr. Beatrice Tucker.
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