Bellevue Natural-Birth Center, Haven for Poor Women, Closes

clipped from www.nytimes.com Bellevue Natural-Birth Center, Haven for Poor Women, Closes By A. G. SULZBERGER and NICK PINTO The Bellevue Birth Center was celebrated as a landmark achievement for the natural-birth movement in New York City when it opened in 1998. The luxurious natural-birth center, designed to feel more like a home than a hospital, was the only one of its kind dedicated not to Manhattan’s trend-conscious set, but to poor, mostly immigrant women on Medicaid. But last month, as Carolina Palmgren prepared to give birth to her first child there, she learned from a midwife that the center at Bellevue, a city hospital, had been quietly closed. “The upsetting thing is that there was no notice,” said Ms. Palmgren, 31. The closing has provoked complaints about a lack of public notice that it was being considered, as well as about the declining number of natural-birth options in the city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/nyregion/07birth.html