Boston, Mass., November 5, 2006 --
Ruth Watson Lubic, CNM, EdD, founder and president emerita of the District of Columbia’s Developing Families Center and founder and chair of the Family Health and Birth Center, today was presented with the American Public Health Association (APHA)’s 2006 Martha May Eliot Award, which honors exceptional achievements in the field of maternal and child health. Lubic received the award here during APHA’s 134th Annual Meeting and Exposition.
“Ruth Lubic has been creative, made distinguished achievements and provided extraordinary service to mothers, infants and families her entire career,” wrote APHA Maternal and Child Health Section Chair Jan Weingrad Smith, CNM, MS, MPH, in a letter nominating Lubic for the award. “She is a shining example of the kind of advocate Martha May Eliot was for women and children.”
Among her many professional accomplishments, Lubic collaborated with members of APHA’s Maternal and Child Health Section in the 1980s to develop a position paper on out-of-hospital births, which led to national standards for birth centers. She served as general director of New York’s Maternity Center Association for 25 years. Under her leadership, the association opened the first freestanding birth center on Manhattan’s East Side in 1975 and opened a second birth center in an inner city section of the South Bronx in 1988.
Lubic’s vision has been to give all families a choice of environments for childbirth and to promote the midwifery model of personalized care as an alternative to increasing technological intervention in labor and birth. She helped facilitate the establishment of more than 200 freestanding birth centers in and beyond the United States. As co-founder and president of the National Association of Childbearing Centers in 1983, Lubic guided the association’s mission of encouraging the development of well-managed, accredited birth centers nationwide.
One of Lubic’s professional goals was to develop an innovative model of services for low-income families to reduce the abysmal health disparities in D.C. The Developing Families Center opened its doors in northeast Washington, D.C., in 2000 after Lubic raised the money to renovate a vacant supermarket. She was able to raise support from several national and local foundations to support the umbrella organization and the birth center, the first in the city.
Lubic has been honored with awards throughout her career, from the Letitia White Award for highest academic average at University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing to one of Ms.Magazine’s 80 Women to Watch in the ‘80s to National Nurse of the Year by the March of Dimes.