With the help of a Lawrence mid-wife, Christine Ilhoff, left, gave birth to her son Orris, left, in a tub at her home in Lawrence, two years ago in August. At right is her husband Carter Kline and their daughter Iris, 4.

Brenda Frankenfeld, is a midwife in the area. In her office where she does pre-natal and postnatal exams with clients.

In 1970 when Fran Beier gave birth to her son, Christopher, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Missouri, she had to fill out reams of paperwork just so she and her baby could sleep in the same room.”I was the first woman in the history of that hospital who had said she wanted to do that,” says Beier.

But when Beier awoke at 3 a.m., Christopher was missing. Bleary-eyed and panic stricken, Beier bounded down the hallway in search of a uniform. There was a secretary at a desk surrounded by nurses chatting. A batch of babies in the nursery wailed, unattended.

“Where is my baby?” Beier asked. A nurse pointed to Beier’s baby, who was sleeping peacefully. Beier placed him in a basket and pushed him back into her room, knowing that she had better stay awake: If she dozed, the nurses might take him from her care again.

Beier’s son is an adult now, but the event was a catalyst, launching a career in midwifery that spans decades.

“I don’t know how they could stand to listen to that kind of distress and not respond, and I wanted my baby to know that if he cried I would respond,” says Beier.

A Lawrence midwife, Beier has attended more than a thousand home births. And that number is expected to grow as more American women are birthing their babies at home, according to data culled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of women who give birth at home is still very low in the United States — less than 1 percent. And the boost in interest is mainly from white women, but the interest and activity may represent a subtle paradigm shift and growing acceptance of birth outside the hospital.

Brenda Frankenfeld, a midwife in Lawrence, had all three of her children at home. Beier was her midwife, and, afterward, her mentor, training her in midwifery for seven years. Now Frankenfeld attends 38 to 50 home births per year.

“I am very, very selective,” says Frankenfeld. “(My mothers) take responsibility for their health.”

Frankenfeld’s transfer rate is 7 percent: seven out of 100 of the births she attends are moved to the hospital for reasons ranging from breech to bleeding to high blood pressure.

“I do not attend high risk at home,” says Frankenfeld. “If a mom looks at me and says something is not right, we go in. There may not be anything clinical going on that I can see, but I trust her.”

The women Frankenfeld follows to term are healthy and nutrition-conscious.

One such mother was Christina Ihloff, who gave birth to her son in a water tub at her home in Lawrence on a hot August day two years ago.

Ihloff had started having contractions at 5 a.m., while still in a waking state. It was her second child — she had had her daughter, Iris, 4, at the Topeka Birthing Center — so she knew what to expect. Ihloff went about her day normally: going for a walk with Iris, running errands and stopping to get a haircut. Meanwhile her husband prepared the water tub.

About 6:30 p.m., two hours before giving birth, Ihloff slid into the tub and tried to relax inside the water. The pain was getting worse. She had her husband call Frankenfeld.

To cope with the pain, Ihloff concentrated on breathing and made noises, which confused and startled her daughter. Her husband gave Iris a bowl of strawberry ice cream, and turned on the TV, tuning to a preschool show. Then he returned to Ihloff’s side, holding her hands for support.

About 8 p.m. Frankenfeld arrived.

At one point Ihloff said, “I can’t keep doing this all night.”

“That’s OK. You don’t have to,” Frankenfeld said.

Ihloff gave birth to her son minutes later. Frankenfeld caught him and handed him right to Ihloff who clutched him closely to her chest. A sense of contentment washed over her in waves. The moment was peaceful. No one was there to pluck her baby away and clamp the cord, or shock him into breathing. Ihloff could enjoy her son without being bothered.

“I believe that babies and mothers are working together during labor,” says Frankenfeld. “I have seen babies move into positions they needed to move in to be born right as I was getting ready to help them. It’s a mom and a baby physiologically and anatomically working together in a very beautiful dance. And this is how birth happens, and if we don’t mess with it, if we don’t intervene, most of the time it works perfectly fine.”