Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ring camera records baby’s birth
Susan Anderson remembers feeling some labor pain, but she couldn’t have imagined how surprisingly fast her daughter was born.
She and her husband made the short trip from their Coral Springs home to a birthing center. She was footsteps from the center’s front door Thursday, but didn’t make it: She gave birth to her second daughter right there in the parking lot.
Her baby girl, Julia Anderson, was born healthily — now with a very interesting story to tell when she gets older. “My first daughter was a normal length, I would say, about two hours of pushing. I thought this one might be faster but I definitely didn’t think it would be like this,” Susan Anderson said. “I didn’t expect anything like it.”
After receiving the call at Natural Birthworks Birth Center while the couple was on the drive over, midwife Sandra Lobaina quickly put on her gloves and prepped the room that Anderson wouldn’t even end up needing for the birth.
Once she rushed outside to help her out of the car, Lobaina says that Anderson only took a few steps before she started pushing. Anderson was on the front steps of the building in Margate. Lobaina helped her through the delivery, catching the baby as she dropped through the side of her shorts.
“Her husband and I were thinking about picking her up before the baby came and taking her inside, or maybe pulling her shorts off,” Lobaina said. “But if we had done that, the baby probably would have come out in the air or flopped down. Really, the only thing to do was to pull the shorts to the side.”
Lobaina worked to create a comfortable environment for Anderson, explaining the situation to police in the parking lot who were drawn over by the commotion.
“The police kept coming forward, and I wanted them to stop, because I didn’t want her space or privacy to be invaded,” Lobaina said. “So I just tried to keep them at a safe distance.”
The baby came out screaming and crying, immediately signifying to Lobaina and Anderson that she was healthy. “From the time I realized I was in labor to the birth, only about two or three hours had passed all together,” Anderson said.
The Ring doorbell camera on the building’s entrance caught the entire birth on camera from the moment the couple walked toward the steps to the moment they walked inside after the baby had been born. The progression was nerve-wracking for Anderson and her husband, Joseph,
She explained, though, that she was much more calm than many others may have been, because she had a relationship with her midwives already.
“I always refer to my support team, and I think that if I hadn’t had our older daughter with them, if I didn’t already have that relationship, I would have been much more panicky,” Anderson said. “But I kind of already knew the movements, so I was more calm than a new mother would have been.”
Expectant mothers working with Natural Birthworks Birth Center do exercises and training before the birth, helping Anderson be prepared for the birth. “Our moms are trained throughout the pregnancy to trust their body and move their body, and this was also her second baby with us, so she knew the process,” Lobaina said.