"From 1950 until 2001, Lovie Beard Shelton practiced midwifery in eastern North Carolina homes, delivering some 4,000 babies to black, white, Mennonite, and hippie women; to those too poor to afford a hospital birth; and to a few rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased. This is a provocative chronicle of Shelton's life and work, which spanned enormous changes in midwifery and in the ways women give birth"--