When our daughter was born, over 51 years ago, Branson General Hospital in Toronto where our then-doctor had hospital rights, was not a teaching hospital, and at the time of my admission there were no doctors on staff or being taught the practise of their profession.  In the Labour room I was examined by a nurse whose opinion it was that I was a long, long way from delivering, though this was a second birth.

It didn't take long before I sent my husband, who was with me, giving me ample emotional support and encouragement, to desperately seek out the nurse, to inform her that delivery was imminent.  She felt otherwise, and though she had contacted my doctor, he had simply rolled over in bed. 

The next thing I knew in my delirium, I was looking up at the green-mask-covered face of a doctor in scrubs who was assisting the nurse in moving me onto a delivery-room bed and then speedily whisked me there, where our daughter was born.  That 'doctor' happened to be my husband whom the nurse had delegated to assist, as she was the only nurse on duty that night.

Mine was an otherwise normal birth, despite my trepidation and pain.  Unlike the breech birth of an underweight baby born in an Ottawa jail cell late last month. 

Julie Bilotta, 26-years old, in custody at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, whose hours-long agony in childbirth appeals were ignored by guards and by nurses on duty there, gave birth with the help of paramedics who were called when the baby's feet emerged, delivering her baby in a jail cell.