NEWS

Women’s health advocate, birthing center pioneer Ruth Lubic to give lecture Nov. 9

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Ruth Watson Lubic had spent decades as a nurse midwife, educator, administrator and crusader and was at the age where most health-care professionals dream about retirement.

Lubic, instead, was dreaming up ways in which she could help low-income pregnant women connect to the prenatal care they often cannot receive, due to transportation issues or lack of information about free health care. In her late 60s, Lubic took on the monumental task of establishing a birth center in Washington, D.C., aimed at reducing the high rate of infant mortality in the poorest areas of the city.

Lubic’s District of Columbia Developing Families Center, a model expanded to more fully meet the needs of families, opens its doors this month after providing prenatal and birth care at Howard University Hospital while renovations of its new building were completed. She will share her insights into prenatal care for low-income women and families and the need for neighborhood birth centers at a Nov. 9 lecture sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing.

"Setting Health Care in its Social Context: The DC Developing Families Center" will be the topic of the 6 p.m. 50^th Anniversary Kemble Lecture, to be held at the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building on the UNC-CH campus. The annual lecture, which has featured renowned leaders in the field of health care, is named for Elizabeth Kemble, dean of the UNC-CH School of Nursing from its 1950 establishment until 1968.

Glaxo Wellcome and UNC Hospitals are sponsoring this year’s lecture.

In 1993, Lubic received a five-year, $375,000 "Genius" Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for her contribution to the development of the birth center model in New York state and for providing quality health care to women and infants for decades. A birth center uses nurse midwives to assist pregnant women through the entire maternity experience, including delivery. Obstetricians and pediatricians are typically involved as consultants and as a back-up team at a local participating hospital.

When Lubic received her grant, she soon decided to move her efforts from New York City to Washington, D.C., where the infant mortality rate was twice the national average, and start a birth center in one of the city’s poorest areas, Wards 5 and 6.

Since March 2000, the District of Columbia Birth Center has provided prenatal care and birthing services to low-income women. Also provided through two collaborating partners are services to families, including comprehensive health care, immunizations and an array of social services including job counseling, child care and adult education. Together, they comprise the DC Developing Families Center.

"I’ve learned from one low-income woman in the South Bronx that ‘if you can do this (give birth), you can do anything. You can get a job, you can go to school.’ Every time a baby is born, hope comes back and strengthens families," said Lubic in a November/December 1998 Nursing World article.

For more information on Lubic’s lecture, call (919) 966-1412. For more information on the UNC-CH School of Nursing, click on www.unc.edu/depts/nursing/about/index.html.

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Note: Dr. Lubic will be available for media interviews by phone after Oct. 16. To arrange a time to speak with Dr. Lubic, please call Lisa Mincey Ware at (919) 966-1412.