Page 18 - 08_Oct-2025
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City
Health
Delivering Comfort
Demand for midwives and birthing centres is
rising, but access remains out of reach for many
by Brooklyn Hollinger
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 Mid-
wives, 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 en-
rolment through six weeks postpartum.
Roughly 3,400
Albertans remain
on a waitlist, with rural
and Indigenous families
facing the biggest
barriers to care.
“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 com-
plications such as breech position or a
history of excessive bleeding. Hospital
deliveries, meanwhile, remain the standard
for all types of pregnancies, and anyone
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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 hospi-
tal staff, whose priorities are less about
emotional support and the choice of how
to give birth, but more about doing what-
ever 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.” ED.