“It was a shock.” said Certified Nurse Midwife Suzanne Wertman, “I’ve been to four other ACNM annual meetings as a participant, but never as a presenter. I was so proud to be up there in front of all of my peers and some of my mentors introducing these amazing women who are working so hard for mothers and babies.” Wertman is one of the CNMs whose termination from Carolina OBGYN spawned the formation of WMM? last August.

She said that she was overwhelmed by the reception. “We received two standing ovations and had crowds of people gather around us after the talk, greeting us with gratitude, questions, and their own stories of job loss.”

“I felt like I was accompanying a rock star,” Santaballa said of Kreutzer. Four giant head shots adorned the entrance to the conference, and Kreutzer’s was one of them, hanging larger than life next to famous model Christy Turlington who has become an activist in maternal health advocacy. “Not only was it totally crazy to see this huge glamorous photo of the woman I protested beside on the side of the road for a month,” Santaballa said, “but it suddenly hit me that, like Turlington, our small town group was being recognized for its part in the national pro-midwifery movement. That‘s huge.”

Turlington’s upcoming documentary, No woman, No Cry, focuses on the problem of under-reported maternal mortality rates, the U.S. rate being higher than many developing countries. Turlington is one of several in Hollywood to publicize the national maternity care crisis. “What we’re all saying is that too many mothers and babies are dying in this country,” Santaballa said. “Birth has become so medicalized that women are losing the ability to make better childbirth choices.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) stated in 1990 that a midwife is the best choice for pregnancy care and birth attendance in low-risk cases. European countries provide evidence for this. 70% of births in Europe are attended by midwives. The maternal and neo-natal mortality rates there are some of the lowest in the world.

In the U.S., however, maternity care looks frighteningly different. Less than 8% of all births in the U.S. are attended by a midwife. We have higher rates of death for mothers and babies than most developed nations and many developing nations. Midwives are too frequently discouraged by hospitals and often marginalized by OBs.

Marsden Wagner, M.D. former Director of Women’s and Children’s Health at the World Health Organization, says in his book Born in the USA, that this is no surprise. “The more the practice of midwifery grows and succeeds, the more threatening midwives are to the obstetric monopoly, so, predictably, there has been an obstetric backlash.”

WMM? speaks to the “obstetric backlash” that shook the Wilmington birthing community last August in a recent documentary produced by Kreutzer. It was this documentary aired on YouTube that got ACNM’s attention. “The documentary says it all,” Santaballa said. “Mothers were cheated out of the birth they signed up for. So families came together to fight the system that took that away from them and didn’t stop until they won. We have many more battles and we plan to handle them all that way.” That, she said, is the message that ACNM seemed hungry to hear.

Months before attending the conference Kreutzer began fielding calls from consumers and midwives in other areas of the country who were interested in fighting hospital policies and OB “backlash”. They contacted Kreutzer to find the secret to WMM?s success.

A woman from San Diego called and said that she and many other supporters were planning to meet at Scripps Memorial hospital in Encinitas, CA once a week to protest the loss of pro-natural birth Obstetrician, Dr. Robert Biter, known in and around San Diego and now across the nation as “Dr. Wonderful“. Kreutzer encouraged her to up the ante. “I said, no, no, you have to do it every single day. The hospital administrators have to know that you are not going away,” she said. After a few days of daily protests swamped with angry families, Scripps Memorial publicly reinstated Dr. Biter.

Kreutzer said that she remembers wishing that she’d had someone to call. “It was hard starting from scratch,” she said. “It’s been a lot of trial and error.” She hopes to offer their hard-earned format for shaking things up to midwifery advocacy groups everywhere. “That’s what we hoped to present at the [ACNM] meeting, that we‘ve been there, done that, and did some things right that are worth sharing.”

Participating in ACNM’s annual meeting gave WMM? an opportunity to reach out to midwives and women across the country who are working toward the same goal – to ensure that pregnant women have access to the care they seek. “As mothers or midwives, as concerned citizens – when we come together, we can be a catalyst for change – one hospital, one private practice, one midwife at a time.” Kreutzer said. “We were honored to be recognized [by ACNM] as an active part of that process.”

Modeled after a Utah-based initiative called Freeways to Fuel, the program, which recently garnered national attention, is unique in that it utilizes land otherwise unsuitable for food crops or livestock. Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping tools are used to find suitable locations to grow crops on NCDOT rights of way. Through this partnership, NCDOT plants and maintains the crops while N.C. State, which has a growing biofuels program, conducts research on the plantings.

“The biodiesel program is one example of our department’s overall commitment to creating a more livable, sustainable future in North Carolina,” said Transportation Secretary Gene Conti. “We are constantly exploring innovative ways to realize this vision, whether we are using alternative fuels like biodiesel and solar power, conserving energy at the state’s first green rest area or recycling construction materials.”

The N.C. program is in its second year, and this year’s crop, totaling just under 10 acres, consisted of four plots of canola grown along roadways in Raleigh, Faison, Mount Airy and Rutherford County. N.C. State will process the crop using specialized equipment designed to extract oil from the canola seeds to make biodiesel.

“This program is an excellent example of what can be done through a successful partnership, and gives us the opportunity to work with the university to explore the feasibility of growing biofuel,” said state roadside environmental field operations engineer Ted Sherrod, who chairs the biofuels research project. “Biodiesel plants like canola and sunflower produce beautiful blooms that make our roadsides more attractive, and beyond that, provide a source of cleaner-burning fuel.”

NCDOT and N.C. State experimented with sunflowers last year as the program’s inaugural crop with yields averaging almost 550 pounds of sunflower seed per acre. After processing, it is possible to generate about 40 gallons of biodiesel from each acre of sunflowers.

N.C. State researchers calculated that the cost of biodiesel production would equal the cost of purchasing gasoline or diesel fuel, and have less environmental impact. Biodiesel crops require minimal maintenance, along with possessing aesthetic value.

NCDOT is committed to reducing its reliance on fossil fuels and improving air quality in North Carolina by using biodiesel in its diesel powered fleet. Currently, the department’s entire diesel powered fleet uses B20 biodiesel, a mixture made up of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent ultra-low sulphur diesel fuel. Since 2006, the department estimates it has saved approximately 4 million gallons of fossil fuel by using biodiesel fuel, and for every gallon of biodiesel used, the amount of particulate matter released into the air is reduced by 20 percent.

But when you’ve had a long day and you want to eat a shrimp salad, the prospect of heading shrimp you buy from one of the roadside igloo vendors one-by-one or even just peeling them out of their resistant little chrysalises is too much! So we go to Harris Teeter and we do what we all do and we buy the imported shrimp, we buy those little cotton candy packages of prepped, miniature crustaceans in the frozen section.

But….BUT…What about this? I haven’t had time to diagram this all yet. But what if ex-offender reentry programs, such as our own LINC (Leading Into New Communities), whose founder Frankie  Roberts my husband keeps running into at these Cape Fear Economic Development Council meetings, took seriously the idea of shrimp processing as a “value-add” for this region.  The local shrimp tastes so much better and is readily available; consuming it supports our local fishing community. But this extra step of processing the shrimp into the form we’re accustomed to eating it in is an absolute — and perhaps hidden — disincentive. Tons of people would eat local shrimp if it were as easy to consume as the store-bought stuff — even if it were a little more expensive. Seriously….If the local farmer’s markets and the local savvy grocers had big pink bags of local shrimp for sale — cooked, de-veined, headed, peeled, cleaned — and you were asked to pay an extra couple bucks per pound for this, wouldn’t you?? I would. I will! And you hear these statistics about how much it costs us each year to keep offenders locked up, versus how little it costs to re-train, to educate, to help them find their way. It’s like a ten-fold decrease in public outlay, with much better, much longer lasting results.

When you think about the particulars of this region, as my husband says, these unsupportable rates of recidivism, and the cost we all bear for every offender that doesn’t have some productive means of support after incarceration. AND you think about the state our local fishing industry is in, it seems like a win-win. We’re taking this to our buddy who works at UNCW/CMS/Sea Grant for his expert opinion — we’ve shelled big local, sharp-headed, smelly, slimy, head-on, delicious shrimp hauls with Scott many times before and stuffed our freezer — but what do you think? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just slow the car down to 10MPH on Water Street on Saturdays or Greenville Loop Seafood any day of the week, pick up a bag of the ready-to-eat stuff, and improve the local outlook in half a dozen ways in the doing?

When I was young my father would invite his students, colleagues and friends down to a particular beach off Highway One between Santa Cruz and San Francisco that was only accessible down a long path and through a tall natural arch, and only during low or medium tides. He would ask each of them to bring a stick of butter, a bottle of wine, and a crowbar, and we would head out onto the slippery rocks beyond our beach encampment for that day, where literally miles and miles of black mussels lay in thick, wet, quickly regenerating beds along the rocks.

You needed a fishing license to get mussels and other shellfish, and many had them. At my age you didn’t need one. I was smaller and could scurry out onto the fingers of rock over the ocean or sometimes under the cornices where the shade and wet protected even thicker collections. Sharp carpets of mussels, wall-to-wall. We could fill paint buckets with enough of them to feed the forty or so beach-goers who’d come along, many of them new to seafood, new to the coast itself.

The secret of mussels is that like clams and other shellfish they are sold by weight, but that their shells are paper thin and their bodies are fat and stuffed into the shells. A clam’s shell is four fifths of its weight! Mussels taste fantastic, and they’re one of the only things I know how to cook. They’re always around, but nobody seems to eat them except as little appetizers or garnishes on restaurant food.

Greenville Loop Seafood — another under-appreciated resource! — has big bags of Prince Edward rope cultured mussels right now, and they always have the flash frozen packs. You can cook them by dropping them into a pot of white wine, water, butter, garlic, scallions in nearly any combination, at any ratios; their shells open up when they’re ready, and the broth is great for dipping french bread in.

My husband, Xiaodong or ‘Nite”, was born and raised in Northeast China. His hometown is Tonghua, a mountain city at the foot of Changbai Mountains in Jilin Province. He graduated University with a Bachelor in Biochemistry and came to the United States in 1996 for further study and to obtain a Doctorate in the United Sates. My husband found himself calling Wilmington home nearly 14 years ago.

Maybe you have seen my husband practicing slow and peaceful exercises at Hugh Macrae Park. The exercises which are part of an ancient traditional cultivation method from China, are called Falun Dafa (also called Falun Gong). Falun Dafa was first introduced in China in 1992 by Mr. Li Hongzhi. It was a time when qigong was very popular in China. It did not take long for Falun Dafa to become the most popular qigong in China. The benefits from Falun Dafa are very positive. At the core of the practice are the principles Zhen-Shan-Ren, which translates into truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. Not only does it help keep the body healthy, it also teaches people to be good, selfless and considerate of others. Practitioners strive to reach a higher realm, also called enlightenment.

Unfortunately, in 1999 the Chinese Communist Party banned Falun Dafa and launched a massive campaign to “eradicate” Falun Dafa. That year, it was estimated that there were at least 100 million practitioners in China. Due to fear of losing control over the masses, former dictator Jiang Zemin, single-handily banned Falun Dafa. What were once peaceful and serene group exercise sites are now desolate, empty parks. Group volunteers were arrested simply for bringing a radio to play music in the park during exercises. Police posted signs on street poles or trees near practice sites saying things like they were no longer allowed to practice. This was just the beginning of what turned into to a more than a decade long persecution.  Millions of lives have been shattered.

Countless and unimaginable abuses are happening to Falun Dafa practitioners everyday in China.

Thousands have been killed, tortured, arrested, sent to brainwashing centers, forced labor camps, homes ransacked repeatedly, forced into homelessness, fired, kicked out of schools, the list continues. Mrs. Sun, a 39 year old practitioner fled to Beijing from her hometown, Inner Mongolia, to avoid persecution from officials who knew that she practiced Falun Gong.

On April 22, 2009, police abducted Mrs. Sun from her home after her husband had been detained for handing out DVDs related to Falun Gong and her number was found in his phone. The couple was interrogated and within hours, Mrs. Sun was dead. Sources inside China who viewed the body reported marks from electric batons and blows with a heavy object.   Shenli, who spent 2 years in a forced labor camp (http://faluninfo.net/article/641/?cid=61) spoke of his ordeal, “I went through a lot of hardships which are beyond my ability to describe.

As a human being I lost all my rights and freedom in an instant. I was beaten and was forced to do physical labor. It was an extremely abusive and dark environment. I was surrounded by criminals, bombarded with all kinds of evil lies and propaganda about Falun Dafa, kept in isolation from my family and friends, and was under a state of perpetual pressure to give up my beliefs. What kind of suffering was it? It was enough to destroy a person’s will.” Zhao Ming, who was once tortured in a Beijing labor camp said, “You can’t fathom their actions with a normal mind.” Zhao once said, “It is complete persecution of our spiritual belief. We didn’t do anything illegal…torture is used to ‘transform’ people into machine-like puppets without a conscience, who can be used as instruments to harm others.” If the whole basis of Falun Gong is to become morally outstanding and healthy persons, what exactly do China’s rulers wish to “transform” them into instead?  Ms. Sun, Shenli and his wife, and Zhao are just a speck of what has happened and continues to happen, to thousands, if not millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China.  Jay Nordlinger of the National Review Online wrote early this year,” You could write about a Falun Gong practitioner abused or killed by the Chinese government, everyday.”

A most recent discovery was the black market trade of organ harvesting (http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-3-30/53503.html ). A detailed report (http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ ) was compiled by two Canadian lawyers and the findings: Communist officials have acted in cahoots with surgeons, police, prison authorities, and the military to systematically carve up Falun Gong adherents for their tissues and body parts. As many as 36 such camps are said to exist, the largest holding up to 120,000 people. David Matas, one of the lawyers and a leading international human rights lawyer wrote, “Falun Gong practitioners in prison are systematically blood tested and examined. Yet, because they are also tortured, this testing can not be motivated by concerns over their health.”  Organ harvesting in China is not something unheard of, in the past, the US government raised concerns over organ harvesting of executed prisoners in China.

It is quite reasonable to wonder: Why is this happening? Of course, the former dictator, Jiang Zemin was power obsessed and extremely jealous of Falun Dafa’s popularity. However, it would not have been entirely possible to carry out this persecution without the backing of the communist regime. A well known human rights lawyer who is now missing in China after being abducted by communist officials once wrote, “This regime’s twisted undertaking of brutally suppressing people of faith is not something that started a mere six years ago. However, the cruel nationwide persecution of Falun Gong believers has seen no precedent…” Indeed, it is in communist nature to brutally suppress the people and deprive them of the most basic human rights.  Currently, a great majority of China’s resources have been pushed into the persecution of Falun Dafa and concealing the truth from the world.

Looking over the history of the Communist Party in China, more than 80 million lives have perished under its despotic rule. The first year of communist rule there was a “persecution of counterrevolutionaries”: ten million lives were executed. Then another movement followed and two million lives were killed. In the ‘land reform’ several million landowners and business owners lost their lives. In 1959 and 1961, a great man-made famine occurred in China with an estimated 48 to 60 million people who starved to death. The Cultural Revolution in 1966-1976 was one of the darkest times ever seen. It was like hell. Any research found on the subject will show that the move was to destroy human conscience and human nature. During the summer of 1968, in the Guangxi Province alone, more than 100,000 “counter-revolutionaries” were cut open alive and their internal organs eaten as delicacies ( http://www.johngittings.com/id47.html ).  It is quite clear the CCP has perfected its evil nature during its 60 year rule and continues to control the Chinese people by instilling fear. ( http://www.falunhr.org/newsletter/TheLastStand-2008.pdf )

Since the publication of The Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party by The Epoch Times newspaper, (http://ninecommentaries.com/) over 70 million people of renounced communism.  Chief Editor of the Epoch Times wrote, “For the first time, the Chinese people can step back from the Communist nightmare and consider the beauty and significance of the ancient civilization that the Communist Party worked so hard to destroy.”  For 11 years, Falun Gong practitioners in China have sacrificed their lives resisting an unprecedented evil that has befallen mankind.  Everyday Falun Gong practitioners risk their lives to let the world know that Falun Gong is good and the persecution is wrong.

In Wilmington, separated from China by land and water, Xiaodong works to let the people in China know the true picture of what is really happening to the beautiful Chinese people. Currently he is tackling the intense internet censorship in China. He hopes that the people in China can learn the truth and have access to websites related to human rights. (http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-8-21/58908.html) As a family, you can find us making phone calls to Chinese 610-Offices (Gestapo like places built specifically for persecuting Falun Gong), labor camps, judges, and prisons in China. We want them to know that Falun Gong is good and what they are doing is wrong. The persecutors, too, have become victims of the Communist Party, deceived by the machine lying propaganda. You can find us speaking with the US government and setting up display booths at local festivals and events. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.” Once this page of history turns, one wonders what will be said of us. Did we just stand by and let this happen? Edmond Burke is attributed with saying, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Greater Good Productions put on and got lots of good sponsors for what was essentially a giant yard sale at Legion Stadium that raised money for a number of good environmental causes — Cape Fear Riverwatch, Penderwatch, and the Coastal Federation — and featured a recycled art show and booths by local “green living” businesses. A canny combination of things that has people reusing, trading, gifting, learning, meeting.

This year I’m into reuse and consolidation, and so I want to talk about a great community project that already exists, that I’m taking part in, and that I hope will be a part of the reading going on here in and around the Grove Project:

One Book, One Community is a project to promote literacy and a love for reading in New Hanover County, to celebrate diversity, and foster a community of readers by providing opportunities to explore and discuss a common text.

The idea, in brief, is that the whole county is a single, giant book club, and that we all read a book chosen by a committee of smart interdisciplinarians to be especially relevant and thought-provoking — past books includes Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name and The House on Dream Street by local novelist Dana Sachs, who’s got a new book out. In fact, we’ve already had some good discussion about 2008’s ODOC choice, Never Let Me Go, which I loved.

This year’s choice, for which there have already been some public discussions, is Greasy Rider, a book about a cross-country adventure the author takes in a converted diesel to explore sustainability, the environment, the country. I picked my copy up today at Pomegranate Books.

Discussions and other events related to this book are coming up. See you there!

In Novemeber of 2009, Olivia Marshburn, a Certified Nurse Midwife and long time local opened the first legal home birth practice in the area since she can remember. “I don’t know of a legal homebirth practice here in my lifetime.” Marshburn said. There have been, she added, numerous CPMs (Certified Professional Midwives) working underground in and around Wilmington since the early 70’s.
Her Hampstead-based homebirth practice, Midwifery Services, Marshburn said, is one of four legal home birth practices in the state. Her staff includes assistant midwife, Meredith Christie, and midwife apprentice Antoinette Palmer.

Marshburn’s home-based office, designed and built by she and her husband, rambles from the front of the house to the back and is complete with a small desk near the entrance, a wooden massage table and an entire wall of books relating to women’s health, both current and historical texts. The office is facing south and welcomes the light through three windowed walls. Remnants of a robust summer garden can be seen from the back window. A wooden doll house and several other wooden toys lay next to the desk on the floor provided to entertain the children of clients.

After opening the French doors on the North side of the office revealing a spacious living room with vaulted ceilings that seem limitless, Marshburn said she always knew she’d return to homebirth. “I decided long ago that when I retired I would open a homebirth practice.” She said.

She entered midwifery in the early 80’s as a direct-entry midwife or lay midwife (known then as “granny” midwives). Later, as a single mother raising two young sons, Marshburn needed a more dependable income and decided to take her passion down a different road. She received her Nurse Midwifery certification from UCSan Fransisco in 1993 after six years of education and training. She has since worked as a midwife for the National Health Service Corp., for Dr. Helen Sandland – a former Wilmington obstetrician, and at the naval hospital at Camp Lejeune.

She would have retired from her CNM position at the Naval Hospital in August 2012. But her plans changed suddenly last summer when more than a hundred women in and around Wilmington found themselves without midwifery options. “Our only local homebirth practice ended suddenly and the void in available homebirth services was not acceptable to me,” Marshburn said. Then, in August, came the termination of Carolina OBGYN’s midwifery program. “Suddenly there were all these women without options. I couldn’t sit back and let that happen.” She said. “I chose to leave my job early because I believe women have a fundamental right to choose where, when and with whom they have their babies.”

Marshburn comes from a long line of similarly strong women who also played an active part in serving this community. Her grandmother was a midwife and a nurse, and her mother a nurse. Her drive to serve the underserved is likely rooted in the example of service her predecessors provided. “My grandmother lived in Sampson County in her younger years and the closest doctor was in Wallace. Back then, birth wasn’t an emergency. Birth was to be attended and my grandmother was there for many mothers who may have otherwise gone unattended,” Marshburn said.

Marshburn believes that the idea of “attending” women through the many transitions in their lives needs to be renewed. In over twenty years of birth experience she has invariably seen, she says, that there two polar categories of birth attendants. “There are those who love, honor and respect the process, and then there are those who want to control it, who are afraid of it, like it’s a train wreck waiting to happen.” This area, she says, needs more of the former.

Marshburn has been “approved to practice” by a supervising obstetrician currently practicing in North Carolina. North Carolina is one of only six states in the U.S. that requires midwife supervision. Midwives in most states are required to “collaborate, consult, and refer” with practicing physicians but are considered autonomous and are at liberty to practice independently.
In addition to frequent contact with her supervising physician, Marshburn has an open professional relationship with several other physicians. “I have the ability to informally consult with eight physicians in the state, three of whom practice in Wilmington.” Marshburn said.

Per a signed agreement between she and her supervising physician, Marshburn’s “evidence-based” practice follows protocols outlined in section 88 of New Zealand’s Public Health and Disability Act. Eighty percent of births in New Zealand are attended by midwives. New Zealand is statistically a great place to have a baby having better outcomes for mothers and babies than other developed nations including the United States.

The road ahead, she confides, has yet to be paved. “There will challenges regarding hospital transfer and other necessary collaboration with the local medical community,” Marshburn said. “But, there are challenges in every endeavor. If it’s the right thing to do, you just keep doing it.” Marshburn feels hopeful that, together, she and hospital care -providers will work out the kinks and enable women efficient, smooth transfer to a higher level of care by a hospital obstetrician or hospital-based midwife if the need should arise. “Wasting time due to fear and political concerns is not safe practice and cannot be tolerated or accepted by our local women and families.” She said.

Women deserve the right to choose, Marshburn said. “Women hold 99% of household leadership. They are largely in control of how their families enter the systems of society. If we let establishments – medical, religious, political – dictate how women use and share their personal power, then those establishments control the population,” she said.
Marshburn sees nothing but hope in the future of birth. “Things are changing,” she said. “Awareness is growing. I think more and more people are realizing that birth is not to be feared, but rather loved and celebrated.”

Related links

• Where’s My Midwife
• Midwifery Services
• Wilmington Homebirth Meetup Group

The bicycles always get me, though. They’re parked at nearly every building, at odd angles, sometimes in a heap of metal, but most dutifully locked to a bike rack. Some are late models and look like they cost thousands of dollars, while others appear old, rusted and abandoned. Where are the owners, I wonder? Did they forget where they parked, like some octegenarian Alzheimer’s patient? Or do they say: “I know. I’ll leave my bike by Trask Coliseum and pick it up at the next basketball game.” Maybe this is some sort of share-a-ride program, and EVERYONE has keys to all the locks.

Anyway, this photo essay is courtesy of a curious wanderer.