Keonta Battle didn’t know her baby girl was going to make history.
When Battle was pregnant, she and her husband decided this new baby would be their fourth and final child, a little girl named Peyton who would join three older brothers to complete their family. Keonta even had pink t-shirts made for herself, her husband and their sons that announced this birth was their “last rodeo.”
But the Battle family’s last rodeo was also a first for Alabama: In October, Peyton Battle became the state’s first baby born in a freestanding birth center.
Keonta delivered Peyton with the help of midwives at the brand-new Oasis Family Birthing Center in Birmingham, Ala. It’s one of the first birth centers to open in a state that only recently legalized out-of-hospital midwifery care.
What Keonta didn’t know at the time was that her choice of a birth center sits at the center of a growing statewide fight over how and where people can safely give birth.