Crain’s New York Business.com has brief news story about several celebrities who are midwife advocates and who are working on getting a birthing center opened up by 2010 (they hope) in New York City.

Since the 2003 closing of the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, pregnant women have had few alternatives to hospital birth in New York City. The Seton Center, part of the Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers system, closed in part due to the soaring cost of malpractice insurance for midwives. The new center will not provide that coverage but require practitioners to purchase their own, with midwives and doctors operating as independent contractors billing insurers directly.

Yet more evidence of how unlimited liability and the hope of a jury jackpot can really reduce medical options.  Everyone is poorer as a result.