Gotta love that fads that draw in the hip and trendy...and gullible. Sorry, but I long for the days when the wife was in the delivery room and the husband was pacing in the waiting room huffing on a smoke and drinking from a flask. Good old days....

I am so excited to hear this finally opened, I will be signing myself if I ever find myself in a "delicate situation", I am too afraid of a home birth. Birth centers are very common in other parts of the world and those are places that have less maternal mortality rates than the US. I hardly call this a hip and trendy fad. And @gophfan10101, my dad said that was the best experience to see me being born- that was nearly 40 years ago when it was first opening up to allowing fathers in the room.

Morningstar and Health Foundations do NOT have a licensed medical doctor on staff. Morningstar has 2 chiropractors and Healthfoundations a nauturopath doctor (according to their websites) At least Dr. Calvin is an obgyn with a subspecialty of maternal fetal medicine. If you have an acute obestrical emergency, good luck working a chiropractor!

The article should have explained the difference between the type of midwifery care offered at each birthing center. There are Certified Professional Midwifes (CPM) and Certified Nurse Midwives (CNM). Some of these center's don't even have a licensed physician on staff. Very scary!

The Morning Star center is across from Methodist Hospital. I think that gives any complications a better chance of being taken care of quickly. I'm 62 and was born at home 25 miles from a hospital. Things work out.

The problem with labor and delivery is that things can go wrong at the last minute, and being across the street from the hospital will not be enough. 5 minutes of transport to the emergency room can make the difference between life and death for the baby or mother. Why on earth take that chance? Read hurtbyhomebirth.com is you need convincing.

Nice attitudes. I don't trust a hospital to deliver my baby, but if something goes wrong at the birthing center, I'm right across the street from the hospital. Then I guess a hospital is good enough for you.

jamuelle, I'm not sure you understand one of the main reasons a couple may prefer a birthing center/midwife over a traditional hospital/obstetrician setting. As was said by Dr. Calvin, "We don't need to [treat] normal, low-risk women as if they're obstetrical emergencies waiting to happen." Current obstetrician thinking tends to lean more quickly towards more medical intervention (such as episiotomies, drugs, Caesareans, etc.) as if pregnancy and delivery were a disease. Rather, most pregnancies can be handled well, and more healthily, with less invasive and high-tech procedures. It's not that hospitals aren't good at doing Caesareans, they just may not be so necessary for as many women as have them now.

The price of doing anything in a hospital these days is out of control. Birth centers can do the same job for a fraction of the cost, and do it in a more pleasant environment. I do think that they should have an experienced doctor on hand and access to a hospital if something goes wrong, but giving people the option to move standard birth procedures to places like this can be good for everybody--good for the mother, the child, the family and the tax payers. It may help lower insurance costs for everybody over time.

The article says birth-center births are safer than home deliveries. Notably absent is any data on birth-center deliveries vs. hospital deliveries.