Alice Swift

My first child was born in Cambridge, England, where my husband was a post-doc. We waited to have a baby until he finished school and didn’t want to wait another year until we returned to the US . It was 1965 under the British Health Service. I did not have to pay anything for doctors; visits, hospital, medications, anesthesia, etc; The only thing I paid for was the nursing home where I had the baby and stayed for eight days afterward. It cost me a total of about $50. The reason I was in the nursing home was that there were many couples of childbearing age in Cambridge, a university city. The hospital would be full. The doctor told me I probably couldn’t go to the hospital and the alternative was to deliver the baby at home. I had two more children in the U.S. and it was much more expensive to have them, of course.