Rachel Marino, RN

Rachel Marino, RN, clearly remembers the first time she saw a woman give birth. The Hispanic teenager who went into labor "was so in control of herself and her birth and the experience she was having," she says. "It was striking for such a young woman to be so empowered in her delivery."

As a Master's student in counseling psychology, Marino was interning at a birth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The teenager delivered her baby naturally, surrounded by her mother, grandmother, and cousins, under the guidance of a midwife. Instead of coming in at the end of the process, as a doctor might, the midwife spent large amounts of time laboring with the girl. She also thought it was important that the new mother have a doula who spoke Spanish. Witnessing the birth is when Marino knew she wanted to be a midwife, too.

But first she went to Haiti and Burkina Faso in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. In West Africa, Marino worked with a midwife in a rural health center that served villages within a 50-mile radius. Pregnant women would often have to walk for two to three days to get there. So Marino set up birth huts in rural villages, giving the women access to clean, safe birthing equipment so they could deliver closer to home.

When she returned to the United States, Marino started the undergraduate nursing program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing as a Peace Corps Fellow. Then, in the fall of 2008, when she was also working as a perinatal nurse, she started the School of Nursing's Women's Health Clinical Nurse Specialist program, Midwifery Track. The program is offered in collaboration with Virginia's Shenandoah University, which has a fully-accredited midwifery program.

During all of her years at Hopkins, Marino says she has had outstanding opportunities for field placements. As an undergraduate, she was a doula as part of Hopkins' Birth Companions program. And as a graduate student, she's worked with clinical nurse specialists at the Johns Hopkins Avon Foundation Breast Center and Sinai Hospital, and with midwives at Howard County Hospital. Next summer she hopes to complete her full-time internship at the Bay Area Midwifery Center in Annapolis.

Marino points out that the demand for midwives is starting to grow. This is partly because they now receive 100 percent reimbursement for their services through Medicare as part of the healthcare bill. Also, she says, there aren't as many doctors who are specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. "There's got to be someone to fill in that gap and I think midwives are in a position to do that," she says. "[They can] make healthcare in this country better."

Learn more about the Women's Health Clinical Nurse Specialist, Nurse-Midwifery track