Birth Story

The family of David A. Sinclair MD, the late Honolulu obstetrician who delivered Barack Obama on August 4, 1961, were surprised and honored to learn of his role when the President recently released his long-form birth certificate.

Dr. Sinclair was a freshly minted young doctor in 1961. Born in Portland, Ore., Dr. Sinclair had moved to Hawaii with his family as a child. He served as a fighter pilot in World War II, settling back down in Hawaii after the war. There, he attended college at the University of Hawaii, where he met his wife, Ivalee.

Dr. Sinclair received his medical training, including his residency in obstetrics and gynecology, at the University of California at San Francisco. He returned to Hawaii in 1960.

He delivered babies all over Hawaii, but his practice was centered at a hospital now known as Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, where President Obama was born, according to news accounts.

Dr. Sinclair died in 2003 at the age of 81.

"I'm just honored and proud of my father," said Karl Sinclair, one of Dr. Sinclair's six children.

"I think it's great," said Dr. Brian Sinclair, another son. "Hawaii was a very small place back then so I guess I'm not surprised."

Childbirth is  “a truly murderous business,” the Scottish actress Tilda Swinton told reporters today at the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s violent. And if one doesn’t embrace that, if one can’t embrace it — and it’s really tough to do that — then you’re up a gum tree because it means you’re going to be cutting off a whole part of yourself,” said Swinton, 50, the mother of teenage twins.

Tilda Swinton

Swinton told reporters that movies and television give people an idealized vision of birth, according to a story by Anita Singh in the Telegraph, a British paper.

“In movies, and particularly in television films, when people have babies, they are sitting in a hospital room and there are flowers everywhere. They are made up, magically, and they have a baby in their arms and it’s all really lovely,” she said.

Swinton made the remarks while discussing her latest film, "We Need to Talk About Kevin," directed by Lynne Ramsay, which is generating major buzz at Cannes. The film is based on a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Where do you stand on this? It probably depends on how seriously you take your sports.

The baseball season was only a few weeks old when a sports blogger lambasted Texas Rangers pitcher Colby Lewis for missing a game in which he was scheduled to pitch, in order to attend the birth of his daughter, Elizabeth Grace.

Colby Lewis

Lewis, 31, was the first player to go on Major League Baseball's new paternity leave list. A player can be on the list, and off the roster, for up to three days for the birth of a child.

"Baseball players are paid millions to play baseball," Richie Whitt wrote in a post for the Dallas Observer sports blog. "If that means 'scheduling' births so they occur in the off-season, then so be it. Of the 365 days in a year, starting pitchers 'work' maybe 40 of them, counting spring training and playoffs.

"If it was a first child, maybe. But a second child causing a player to miss a game? Ludicrous."

Twitter and blogosphere lit up with sputtering rebuttals: Fatherhood trumps baseball any day, buster.

The Rangers' pitching coach, Mike Maddux, said he supports the new list.

But baseball writer Rob Neyer waded in on Whitt's side of the fracas for SB Nation:

"I'm going to be honest here, as I have been since the first time this came up, some years ago (official paternity leave is new, but players taking a game off to attend childbirth is not)," he wrote.

"As a human being, I think this is fantastic. As a baseball fan, though? If my team's in the playoff hunt, I'm sorry, but I don't want one of my starting pitchers taking the night off. We're not talking about some guy who works on the assembly line for the Integrated Widget Corporation. We're talking about one of the most talented pitchers on the planet, not easily replaceable. What if your team finishes one game short of the playoffs? Was it really worth it?

"Or as a sage philosopher once observed, The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

"And last I checked, there were many fans of the Texas Rangers."

Well, it's not just the Texas Rangers anymore. Several other players have already gone on the list, including the Oakland Athletics' catcher Kurt Suzuki, Washington Nationals' shortstop Ian Desmond and New York Mets' left-fielder Jason Bay.

“Teams were basically granting [leave to attend births] anyway, but they ended up playing short, and that really wasn’t the goal,” Peter Woodfork, a senior vice president with Major League Baseball, told the New York Times' Tyler Kepner for a story about the list. “[The paternity leave list] leaves no gray area. Neither side feels like, ‘Well, we really want you to stay.’ There’s no guilt, and it helps both sides.”

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Prince William, set to marry on Friday, was born in the private Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital in London on June 21, 1982, more than a week before his due date.

He was the first male of the British royal family to be born in a hospital. Prince Charles also broke with tradition by attending the birth.

Prince William and his parents leave the hospital

Prince Charles and his first wife, Princess Diana, William's mother, arrived at the hospital very early on the morning of the day William was born.

George Pinker MD, the royal gynecologist, attended Diana. She had also been coached by Betty Parsons, a nurse and natural-birth advocate who had helped Queen Elizabeth with a couple of her births.

Many accounts present the birth as "natural" and drug-free, while at least one insider book holds that the princess had an epidural during her 16-hour labor.

William was born at 9:03 p.m., and weighed 7 lb. 2 oz. A 41-gun salute was fired off in his honor. Princess Diana was back home the next day.

Prince Charles, always restrained, was clearly thrilled. He wrote friends, "I can't tell you how excited and proud I am," adding that he found the newborn William "surprisingly appetising."

The way the British royal family handles special occasions is interesting, to me anyway, because everything they do has to be examined in advance through history, tradition and protocol. Then the next day, many, many other people run out and do as close to the same thing as they possibly can.

Birth is no different.

The last few generations of the royal family have provided boatloads of drama that have kept the tabloids chattering and the rest of us agog — romance, opulence, star-crossed lovers, betrayal, tragedy, untimely death.

This week, in the runup to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Birth Story is going to look at a few royal births.

We begin with Prince Charles, William's father, born at Buckingham Palace on Nov. 14, 1948, to then-Crown Princess Elizabeth, 22, and her husband, Prince Philip.

Philip famously played squash with a friend in another part of the palace during his son's birth. To be fair, in 1948 most fathers were at best pacing in hospital waiting rooms during their children's births. And, Philip did bring Elizabeth carnations and Champagne afterwards.

Just two weeks after Charles's birth, in a letter recently sold at auction, Elizabeth wrote a cousin, a bridesmaid at her 1947 wedding,"The baby is very sweet, and Philip and I are enormously proud of him. I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!"

Photo by Cecil Beaton

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week approved the first drug aimed at reducing the rate of pre-term birth.

Makena, hydroxyprogesterone caproate, is an injection approved to stop preterm delivery before 37 weeks of gestation. It is intended for pregnant women who have had at least one spontaneous preterm birth, and is not advised for use with multiple fetuses, or other risk factors for pre-term birth.

One in every eight babies in the United States is born before 37 weeks — 1,500 every day, 13 of whom die from complications.

“Preterm birth is a significant public health issue in the United States,” said Sandra Kweder, M.D., deputy director of the Office of New Drugs in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “This is the first drug approved by the FDA that is indicated to specifically reduce this risk.”

A health care provider injects Makena into a woman's hip weekly, beginning at 16 weeks, or no later than 21 weeks gestation.

The FDA approved Makena under its accelerated approval protocol, which requires a drug's manufacturer to continue to research the drug's efficacy and side effects. An international trial is now under way.

Hologic, a Bedford, Mass.-based manufacturing firm that concentrates on women's health, developed Makena, previously known as Gestiva. Hologic recently finalized the sale of the drug to KV Pharmaceuticals of St. Louis, Missouri.

The FDA okayed Makena's use based on a multicenter randomized double-blind trial that looked at 463 women ages 16 to 43 who had a history of preterm birth. Of the subjects treated with Makena, 37 percent delivered their babies before 37 weeks, compared with 55 percent of women in the control group.

The FDA previously approved hydroxyprogesterone caproate in 1956 under the name Delalutin. The drug was withdrawn from the market in 2001 "for reasons unrelated to safety concerns," according to the FDA.

Pregnant Graffiti by Petteri Sulonen

Babies don't care what the weather is like when it's time for them to be born.

Baby Lucia Pruss was born on Thursday in an improvised birthing center at a storm refuge at Redlynch State College in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, during the 170-mile-per-hour rampage of Cyclone Yasi.

Little Lucia enjoyed what a local official called "a very natural birth in the most unnatural of circumstances."

British midwife Carol Weeks, in Cairns with her husband, Andrew, on a vacation to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, assisted at the three-hour labor of mother Akiko Pruss. Christian Pruss is Lucia's father.

Yasi, called a cyclone in Australia, a hurricane in the Western Hemisphere, is one of the strongest storms ever to hit Australia, officials said. Yasi tore across sparsely settled northern Australia, which was recently hit by catastrophic flooding.

The Leapfrog Group, a 10-year-old hospital monitoring group, has found that doctors and hospitals are commonly scheduling women for elective deliveries before 39 weeks of gestation, even though studies have established a bright arrow that shows that babies are at risk of death or serious health problems if they are born before then.

A survey of 773 hospitals released this week shows that these institutions performed more than 57,000 inductions and Cesarean sections before 39 weeks just in the last year. The hospitals displayed a wide range of rates for early elective deliveries, from less than 5% to more than 40%.

"Leapfrog’s release of 2010 data is the first real evidence that the practice of scheduling newborn deliveries before 39 weeks without a medical reason is common and varied among hospitals even in the same state or community," the report stated.

The brain and lungs aren't fully developed until the very last weeks of pregnancy, said Alan R. Fleischman MD, senior vice president and medical director of the March of Dimes, a group that works to prevent birth defects, and is working with Leapfrog to cut the numbers of early births.

“Women need to protect themselves by refusing to schedule their deliveries before 39 weeks without a sound medical reason, and by knowing the facts about the hospitals they plan to deliver in,” said Leapfrog CEO Leah Binder.

Some hospitals, notably Hospital Corporation of America, have programs in place to encourage doctors to refrain from scheduling Cesarean sections and elective inductions for nonmedical reason, Leapfrog officials said.

Actress Kelly Preston, wife of actor John Travolta, talked with Natalie Morales on the Today show on Wednesday morning about the "silent birth" of her son Benjamin at a hospital in Ocala, Fla., on Nov. 23.

Benjamin weighed eight pounds three ounces. Both Preston, 48, and Travolta, 56, are Scientologists. Their religion espouses a birth free of conversation, as supposedly "any words spoken ...can have an aberrative effect on the mother and the child."

Preston and Travolta have a daughter, Ella Bleu. Their son Jett died in 2009 at the age of 16.

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Frederik, the crown prince of Denmark, and his wife, Crown Princess Mary, brought their newborn twins home from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen today.

The boy and girl were born on Jan. 8. In the custom of Danish royalty, the babies will receive their names at their christening, which could be as long as three months from now.

“I’ve just been told that they were born on Elvis’s (Presley) birthday,” the prince said at a press conference just after the birth. “Then we’ll call one of them Elvis.”

The birth started spontaneously and lasted about five hours, said Princess Mary’s obstetrician, Dr. Morten Hedegaard. The birth team also included midwife Birgitte Hillerup, who said the princess, 38, had an epidural for pain. Frederik attended the birth.

The twins, along with older siblings Christian, 5, and Isabella, 3, are expected to visit their mother’s native Australia this year, perhaps for Christmas. The prince met the princess, nee Mary Donaldson, the Tasmanian-born daughter of a math professor, at a Sydney pub during the 2000 summer Olympics.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images