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= Barbara Levin = Barbara Levin, born 1948 in Eastern Tennessee, is a licensed doctor, currently working as a family physician in Madisonville, Tennessee. She graduated from University of California at Berkeley in 1976, and University of Missouri-Columbia in 1979. During the early 1990's, Levin worked towards providing accessible birthing care to all classes of women across Tennessee by establishing “birthing centers”. She is affiliated with Blount Memorial Hospital at 4233 Highway 411, Madisonville, TN, and is currently licensed to practice medicine in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Birthing Centers
Due to high immortality rates in the United States, and specifically Tennessee, Levin proposed an idea of creating birthing centers to establish an all around safer birthing experience. Levin's ultimate goal was to staff her birthing center with certified nurse-midwives (CNMs). In order to gain support for public funding, she began to campaign for birthing centers, starting in Monroe County under the Healthy Children Initiative. The Healthy Children Initiative was a state-wide prenatal plan promoted by Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander and his wife Honey Alexander.

Levin went on to work alongside King designing MCET, Maternity center of East Tennessee modeled after the Monroe county birthing center, however she used private funding as opposed to public funding used for the Monroe center. However, this was the nations first publicly funded out of hospital birthing center and midwifery program as an effort to combat the lack of widely accessible enhanced birthing care.

In 1992, Barbara Levin began working with Dean Michael Carter of the University of Tennessee Memphis College of Nursing. Her goal was to establish the birthing center at Methodist Hospital, however this plan did not go through. Reflecting back on her experiences with how well the Monroe County hospital went, Levin is not entirely certain as to why her plan had gone wrong. The Memphis, Tennessee hospital she was planning on creating never happened, and inherently the only birthing center that was created out of her plan was the Monroe County birthing center.

External Resources

 * U.S. News: Barbara Levin, Review https://health.usnews.com/doctors/barbara-levin-398604