Johnnie Durham has been up half the night already. The head primate keeper at Monkey Jungle in South Miami-Dade met his wife at the attraction while she was studying primate biology at Florida International University. Soon, the pair were dating and Cher was working at the park too, preparing the animals' diet. They married at Monkey Jungle in May 2003. Nine months later, at 5:30 in the morning of February 18, the father-to-be distracts himself by bouncing on an enormous plastic ball that can help relieve back pain during labor. Johnnie flashes his wife a chimp's grin when she walks past, his extra-long sideburns almost touching the strained outer corners of his lips. Cher is too uncomfortable to be amused.
The enormous stomach and breasts protruding from her petite frame make 32-year-old Durham almost as round as her exercise ball. Her tawny hair is pulled back into a severe bun, revealing a freckled Irish face and light-blue eyes set in a determined squint. She pads into the kitchen, peels a pair of athletic socks filled with rice off her shoulders, and places the fuzzy tubes in the microwave. When Durham lies down again in the couple's bedroom -- the air thick with incense, candlelight, and birdsong twittering from a battered boom box -- her husband gently presses the warm rice socks against the lower curve of her aching belly. All night long, Durham watched the couple's pet sugar gliders chase one another around the wooden cages stacked outside the patio door while her mind replayed the objections to home birth raised by her friends and family: What if something goes wrong? Now, as the tiny marsupials nestle down to sleep for the day, she tells herself: If I can do this, I can do anything.
Durham had not expected to wait until so late in her pregnancy before going into labor. She had been sure the baby would come on her due date, February 7, the night of the full moon. Had she followed the example of her sister-in-law and gone to Baptist Hospital to give birth, as she originally planned, she almost certainly would have delivered by Valentine's Day; her doctor, following the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), most likely would have induced labor by her 41st week of pregnancy. Instead at 1 p.m. on February 14, a still-pregnant Durham hauls her bulging belly to a rally outside South Miami Hospital, where her midwife has organized one of the 20 anti-ACOG demonstrations taking place that day across the nation. Representing more than 40,000 doctors in the United States, ACOG sets guidelines for obstetric practice. Because ACOG is the primary professional organization of ob-gyns in the country, those guidelines help establish the standard of care by which doctors are judged in malpractice suits. The protesters believe that ACOG promotes a level of medical intervention in birth that can be deadly.
Durham joins a group of 30 or so natural-childbirth advocates handing out fliers that decry the nation's rising cesarean section rate. In 1990, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set a target C-section rate for 2000 at 15 percent, the same number recommended by the World Health Organization. But the National Bureau of Health Statistics reveals that in 2002, the most recent official count, the national cesarean rate hit an all-time high of 26.1 percent. The statewide rate in Florida is 32.4 percent, and in South Florida, the rate at most hospitals is higher still.
At 50 percent in 2002, South Miami Hospital had the highest rate in the area, but the latest figures from the Florida State Center for Health Statistics show that at Baptist Hospital, Durham's initial choice, the C-section rate is 41 percent. During the same period, Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood was also 41 percent, Broward General Medical Center was 31 percent, and Plantation General Hospital was 34 percent.
Activists link the rising rate to a series of ACOG positions that they believe promote cesarean section over vaginal birth. Critics are especially concerned about 1999 ACOG guidelines warning that the scars left from the surgical incision during a C-section place mothers at a slightly higher risk of rupturing the uterus when delivering subsequent babies vaginally.
