From Amazon:
Sibyl Danforth, a Vermont lay-midwife, attends a home birth that goes horribly wrong when the laboring mother apparently dies. Sibyl makes a hard decision and performs a C-section on the apparently dead woman to save her baby. The story is based upon the ramifications of this decision - because Sibyl's apprentice and the laboring woman's husband claim that the woman wasn't dead when Sibyl performs the C-section. Thus Sibyl ends up being charged by the state with involuntary manslaughter, under the claim that the C-section Sibyl performed to save the baby's life killed it's mother. Midwives is told from the point of view of Sibyl's daughter, Connie, who is fourteen at the time of the tragedy. As a grown woman and ob/gyn, Connie is still trying to come to terms with what happened to her family in the months after the 'bad birth'.
The ending is very unexpected and it's just an amazing book. Loved this book and so did all at book group. Well worth the read (only point is that if I was pregnant maybe not the best book to read!)
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