Characteristics, Emotional Experience, and Impact of Unplanned Out-of-Hospital Births in the City of Beit Shemesh, Israel

Allison Rosenbaum, CNM, MSS, DM has been living and practicing midwifery in Israel since 2002. She obtained a master’s degree in social work from the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research in 1994, then went on to study nursing and midwifery at MGH School of Health Professionals and Philadelphia University’s Institute of Midwifery and Women’s Health (now Thomas Jefferson University), earning her Master of Science in 2018 and her Doctorate in Midwifery in 2022. Currently, she works at Assuta Medical Center in Ashdod, Israel, and is the director of their waterbirth program. She is also involved in Assuta’s “Atufa birth project” which accompanies and supports women, who have had previously traumatic births or other previous emotional traumas, during their labor and birth. In her spare time, she volunteers for the midwifery emergency birth unit in the United Hatzolah Ambulance Service, a group of volunteer midwives that assist EMTs during emergency out-of-hospital births. Dr. Rosenbaum recently completed her doctorate of midwifery at Thomas Jefferson University where she combined her midwifery experience and her social work knowledge studying unplanned out-of-hospital births in Beit Shemesh. Dr. Rosenbaum has been living in Beit Shemesh with her family for the past 20 years, where she has assisted with over a hundred unplanned out-of-hospital births.