It’s easy to forget you’re in a health-care facility when you step inside Rinita Birth Centre in St. Albert. Instead of sterile halls, there’s a queen-sized bed, yoga balls and a deep tub for water births. If you can see past the oxygen tanks, suture kits and bottles of oxytocin, it can feel like an ordinary home — and that’s what more and more expectant parents in Alberta are hoping for.
Alberta formally recognized midwives in the 1990s, but it was public funding in 2009 that set off a steady climb in demand. In 2011, Edmonton’s Lucina Birth Centre opened, followed by facilities in Calgary and Rocky Mountain House. Before them, midwives practiced almost exclusively in hospitals or homes. Yet even as their numbers grew — from just 20 registered midwives in the early 1990s to 186 today — the supply has never kept up. Roughly 3,400 Albertans remain on a waitlist, with rural and Indigenous families facing the biggest barriers to care.
After operating from a commercial space for six years, St. Albert Community Midwives opened Rinita in 2021, making it Alberta’s fourth — and, to date, most recent — birth centre. According to Anna Gimpel of St. Albert Community Midwives, which operates Rinita, visitors are seeking emotionally supportive care — something less common in hospitals where rotating staff and shift changes disrupt continuity. “That’s what motivated us to organize Rinita,” she says.
Birthing centres instead offer one-on-one care with the same midwife from enrolment through six weeks postpartum.
“We know our clients well, and we are with them from the beginning of their pregnancy to the end,” says Gimpel. “But if any complications arise, we do recommend they deliver at the hospital.”
Birth centres only accommodate low-risk pregnancies — those without complications such as breech position or a history of excessive bleeding. Hospital deliveries, meanwhile, remain the standard for all types of pregnancies, and anyone under a midwife’s care can choose a hospital birth if they wish. “For us, the priority is to respect people’s decisions. And we actively support choices that people make for their pregnancy,” says Gimpel.
This sometimes contrasts with hospital staff, whose priorities are less about emotional support and the choice of how to give birth, but more about doing whatever is medically necessary for a safe delivery. “That can sometimes mean interventions patients didn’t plan for, but our priority is always the safety of both the mother and baby,” says obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Cassandra Hirt-Walsh.
The Grey Nuns doctor admits hospitals can feel busy and impersonal, especially during shift changes, but notes that emergencies can arise even in low-risk pregnancies. She says the term “low-risk” can be misleading, because things can go wrong in an instant, regardless of the otherwise perfectly healthy indicators leading up to the delivery. Natural birth or not, she says, it’s important to have a good backup plan if things escalate. “There’s no one right way,” says Hirt-Walsh. “We recognize that there are different ways people are born and all of those can be viewed as a success.”
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Edify
