Midwifery becomes a lifelong calling

The Mercer County midwife is now delivering a second generation of Amish babies.
By LAURE CIOFFI
VINDICATOR NEW CASTLE BUREAU
STONEBORO, Pa. -- Grace Lucille Sykes was searching for a better education for her children when she moved to Mercer County.
What she found was a lifelong calling.
Sykes, 60, became a midwife shortly after moving to central Mercer County nearly 30 years ago and has since delivered 1,800 babies, mostly Amish.
"I enjoy the babies and working with the mothers and helping through one of the hardest times in their lives," she said. "You get to share the sad times as well as the happy times."
Sykes calls herself a traditional midwife, also known as lay or granny midwife. She has no formal medical training, but apprenticed under another traditional midwife, an Amish woman, before delivering babies solo.
Their group: The North American Alliance of Midwifes estimates there are 2,000 to 3,000 traditional midwives, now called direct-entry midwives by the alliance, in this country.
Alliance spokeswoman Susan Moray, a midwife in Portland, said Pennsylvania and Ohio consider direct-entry midwives alegal, meaning they are neither legal nor illegal.
Her history: That didn't stop state officials, however, from trying to shut Sykes down about 10 years ago. She was ordered to stop delivering babies by Mercer County Children and Youth Services and later arrested for practicing midwifery without a license.
Hundreds of Amish supporters crowded the courtroom at Syke's preliminary hearing to hear the judge dismiss the charges, saying state definitions of midwifery were unclear.
Civil charges filed by the state were also later dropped when a judge ruled that lay midwives in Pennsylvania do not need licenses.
Sykes prefers not to talk about her legal battles, instead focusing on her practice.
Birthing center: Amish from as far away as Mesopotamia and Middlefield travel by horse and buggy or by a hired English driver to the nondescript white building behind her house on Airport Road that is the Cradle Time Birthing Clinic.
Small pink and blue papers dot the walls marking the name, date and footprints of each baby she delivers. The Amish do not permit pictures of their children.
Inside is a waiting area-kitchen and three rooms used for births. Pink, purple and blue, they look like any bedroom, except for a stray oxygen machine or incubator sitting in a corner.
She built the birthing center after doing home births for several years.
"I was doing so many births with kerosene lanterns and homes with no telephones. I felt I could do a safer birth if I had my own conveniences," she said.
Sykes now delivers about 10 babies a month and has gotten to a point where she is delivering a second generation of Amish babies.
The first baby she delivered solo is now 24 years old and she recently delivered his wife's first baby.
Her clientele: The Amish make up about 95 percent of the people who come to her birthing clinic and she's come to enjoy their company.
"I know their customs. I know their mothers and grandmothers. I try to be very careful to respect their wishes and their desires. It's their birth," she said.
Sykes offers prenatal care each Tuesday and Wednesday for pregnant women.
Most Amish women start visits in their fourth month, some as late as their seventh month of pregnancy, something she tries to discourage, she said.
"It's to their advantage if they would come sooner, but you can't break that tradition. They say `I feel fine,'" she said.
Some Amish woman have babies every 13 or 18 months and Sykes is careful to make them aware of keeping healthy and the need for folic acid.
A stock room at the clinic filled with vitamins and natural herbs aids the pregnant women. Most prefer homeopathic medicine to traditional medicine, she said.
Even with the comfortable rooms and herbs and vitamins, Sykes says she knows her limitations.
"Anybody can catch a baby, but you need to know when there are complications and when to transport them to the hospital," she said.
Sykes keeps in contact with local doctors and contracts with a nearby ambulance service that is always available to take one of her women to the hospital.
"You can never be too proud to ask for help. You don't want anything to happen to a mother or a baby," she said.
Her biography: Sykes said she didn't even consider midwifery as a profession growing up as a minister's daughter in Washington state. She went to college in Colorado for an education degree, but later decided she did not want to teach.
She and husband, James, moved to Stoneboro in the early 1970s to put their children in a parochial school and ended up befriending Amish neighbors who told her they needed a midwife.
She studied under an Amish midwife in central Ohio for nearly two years before going out on her own. Sykes also passes that knowledge along, taking on apprentices who must "catch" 50 babies under her supervision before going out on their own.
Another generation: Among those who learned from Sykes is her daughter, Cyndee Sorrell. The 30-year-old Sorrell started helping her mother when she was 9 by cleaning off the babies after birth and doing laundry.
"It grew on me. When I was 16 and caught my first baby I thought, `Yeah this is cool,' but I was not ready to take on the responsibility," Sorrell said.
Sykes' daughter went off to be a missionary for a few years and returned to her mother's clinic when she was 21.
Sorrell, now a mother of five home-schooled children, does only four or five home births each year mainly for Christian couples in the area.
Sykes delivered her daughter's fifth child, Jacob, in August.
The Mercer County midwife says she would like to retire while she is still able to travel and do other things, but that's not happening in the near future.
"I'm not ready to quit just yet. I don't know what it would be like not to do babies," she said.
cioffi@vindy.com