Many women consider the birth of their child a momentous event that happens once or a handful of times in their life. Nancy Spencer has had nearly 4,000 of those moments. Through the years, she’s recorded every last one in a log and will soon release a few of those stories in a book.

Spencer, 64, is a midwife who owns and operates the Lakeside Birth Center at 214th Ave E on Lake Tapps. She began delivering children in 1970 and was one of the forerunners in the resurgence of the natural birth movement in Washington state.

“There have always been midwives, almost as long as their have been births,” Spencer said. “Even as recent as the 1920s, if you were giving birth you would usually call a midwife.”

But midwifery fell out of popularity in favor of hospital births, largely because midwives didn’t have the same medical standards at that time.

So it’s appropriate that Spencer’s 40-year career has been synchronized with the development of standards in natural birthing. In addition to working as a midwife, she taught classes in the practice for several years and cofounded the Professional Midwives Affiliation.

But Spencer wasn’t set on a childbirth career from the beginning. Born in Santa Fe, Calif., she came to the Pacific Northwest to complete a degree in English Literature at the University of Washington and fell in love with the area’s natural beauty, she said. By the time she finished she was showing hints of interest in her future career. Her final thesis was on the subject of childbirth.

“I thought I would be a French correspondent,living abroad and speaking foreign languages,” she said. “I didn’t fully get absorbed [in alternative childbirth] until 1969.”

Her exposure to the alternatives in birth began in the late 1960s, when she and her husband became one of the first couples in Iowa to have a planned unmedicated birth with the father in the delivery room.

During the 70s, she apprenticed under a physician at a natural birth clinic in North Seattle.

During that time, she also helped Green River and Olympic community colleges create a curriculum for people who wanted to know about labor alternatives. She taught those classes for 15 years.

“The couples who would come in to childbirth class arrived very impressionable,” she said. “I mean, they’re adults but they were in awe of all the options in the labor process. It’s an amazing experience to come in as new parents and learn about these options.”

In the late 70s, the legislature passed laws relating to midwifery, helped along by Spencer’s grandfather-in-law, who chaired the Social and Health Services Committee. From 1981 to 1983, Spencer attended the Seattle Midwifery School and became an officially licensed midwife.

She practiced for over 10 years on call before opening the Lakeside Birth Center in 1994.

“Part of the reason I opened the center was because people on state aid could only give birth in a licensed hospital,” she said. “They couldn’t choose to have a midwife in their home. Having a licensed birth center enabled them to have the option.”

The center is equipped for natural and water births. Spencer works closely with a physician to screen for patients who are good candidates for natural birth. Lakeside is also connected to Spencer’s home, making it the only one of its kind in the state after being grandfathered in on a law separating domiciles from birthing centers.

Having that kind of proximity to her work allows Spencer to be consistently available to her clients.

“Babies never come on schedule,” she said with a brief laugh. “I tell my patients, if you think you might be in labor—even if you’re not sure—call me. It’s better a mother come here and discover she’s not actually in labor than to realize it’s too late for me to do anything.

“That’s what most women need as they go into birth, that reassurance of being told yes, you are in labor.”

Spencer has gotten to the point in her career where she is delivering the babies of parents that she delivered. She has no plans to retire.

“It’s not like this is a job I’m dying to retire from,” she said. “I get to deal in the miracle of birth as my job. It’s a wonderful feeling.”

Spencer has kept a meticulous journal of every child she’s delivered, with vital information and bits and

pieces of the stories she’s collected over the years.

She recently decided to return to her English literature roots and compile several of those stories into a book, “Heaven In My Hands,” which will be released by Tate Publishing next month. Each chapter is organized by theme and contains one or more stories about births that she midwifed.

The stories she’s collected were notable to her, but not necessarily her favorite. Even the six grandchildren she midwifed don’t rank among her current favorites, though that’s no comment about them, she said.

“My favorite birth is always the child I’ve just delivered,” she said. “Each birth is so special that it immediately fills your heart and you’re in awe of this new miracle.”