ASHEVILLE – Thirteen years ago Nikita Smart gave birth to her daughter with the help of strangers. She and the girl’s father had split. Her family lived out of town. So the hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, had a sitter stay in the room during labor.

Friends stopped by to check on her, but Smart encouraged them to leave. They had jobs to get to and children to look after. "I was just totally alone,” said Smart, who was considered high-risk because of pre-eclampsia, a potentially dangerous pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure.

Smart, 44, is now training to be a doula and leading efforts in Pisgah View and Hillcrest apartments to make sure expecting African-American mothers in those publicly subsidized neighborhoods never feel like help is far away.

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ASHEVILLE - Rani Khan "caught" her first baby when she was just 4 years old. Her mother, a natural health advocate, had planned a home birth and Khan's sister came sooner than expected. It was just Khan and a birth assistant there to help the laboring woman. The toddler had pushed a chair to the wall to reach the rotary phone and call for help, but the baby came before the midwife arrived.
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Kahn's mother labored for only 15 minutes. The young girl was sitting on a futon when she witnessed her sister's first breath. It was an experience she never forgot. By age 39, Kahn, now a certified nurse midwife, has delivered some 3,000 babies, even though she has no children of her own.

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FRANKLIN - Mission Health’s chief executive offered a somber apology to the people of Macon County on Friday as he announced plans to build a new $43 million replacement community hospital with no labor and delivery services.

Dr. Ronald Paulus, president and CEO of Mission Health, speaking at a news conference in Asheville, said the nonprofit regional health care system was faced with two bad alternatives in an increasingly regulated and expensive health care environment.  “We are very sorry that we cannot keep this program open," he said. "We looked at every possibility that we could conceive of ... We just couldn't find a way."

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ASHEVILLE – Abortion-rights activists held vigil outside the governor's mansion in Raleigh amid statewide concern last year as North Carolina ordered an overhaul of safety regulations for abortion providers. Those protests have subsided, and what's left of demonstrators on the issue in Asheville includes three to four people who meet weekly to hold signs opposing abortion outside a planned new clinic.
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It's not that passions on the issue have been set aside, but disagreement on proposed new regulations has calmed in North Carolina. In a rare movement of accord, the state's largest abortion providers and abortion-rights advocates sided with state officials earlier this week, tentatively agreeing on proposed rule changes for abortion providers.

The changes up for public review come in response to a 2013 legislative directive mandating that the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services create new requirements for abortion providers.  They include the right to annually inspect any licensed clinic and standards for building codes, record-keeping, nurse staffing qualifications, emergency procedures and post-operative care.
Rules for certification of abortion clinics have not been updated in nearly 20 years, DHHS noted in a Nov. 14 fiscal impact analysis of the proposed regulations.

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ASHEVILLE – Young parents, Rebecca and Evan Gurney concede that having a child for the first time is terrifying. But for the North Asheville couple that fact doesn't mean childbirth isn't universally an intimate, even sacred, procedure, something enhanced by the holistic approach of birth centers. The decisions parents make about birth are indicators of how they want to start a family and their lives together, Rebecca Gurney said.

For their first child, the Gurneys went to North Carolina's only nonprofit birth center in Chapel Hill, where they delivered with the assistance of a certified nurse midwife. The relaxed environment and holistic approach empowered them to feel controlled and capable in the delivery room, they said. It's the kind of setting that an Asheville group wants to see in the planned WNC Birth Center, which could open in 2016, making it the state's second nonprofit center for childbirth supervised by licensed nurse midwives.

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CANDLER – An area nonprofit organization and medical facility have teamed up to increase medical and crisis service provision to people in need in the Enka/Candler area.

Last week, Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry and Mountain Area Health Education Center opened the doors to the Ferguson Charitable Center. The building, at 1914 Smoky Park Highway, houses the new MAHEC Family Health Center at Enka/Candler and ABCCM's renovated Hominy Valley Crisis Ministry.

The Ferguson Charitable Center aims to meet two major areas of need, said the Rev. Scott Rogers, executive director of ABCCM, a nonprofit organization made up of a collaborative of 277 churches, which addresses poverty, hunger, homelessness, incarceration and access to health care in Buncombe County.

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