{"id":3825,"date":"2021-03-02T08:50:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T13:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=3825"},"modified":"2025-07-24T17:01:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T21:01:13","slug":"paula-mahone-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/paula-mahone-80\/","title":{"rendered":"Paula Mahone \u201980"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paula Mahone \u201980<\/span><\/strong>, now retired, was a perinatologist, a doctor specializing in high-risk pregnancy. Early in her career, before the on-call hours became too much, Mahone also delivered her high-risk patients\u2019 babies.<\/p>\n

Throughout her career, she has worked to counter one of the problems in U.S. medicine\u2014that pregnancy is often viewed as a disease, Mahone says. Often, doctors don\u2019t listen to their patients or allow women to play a leading role in their pregnancy and birth experiences; they insist on unnecessary medical protocols that don\u2019t improve outcomes.<\/p>\n

To address this, Mahone instilled some of the philosophies used by midwives into her practice, something many of her peers admonished her for. \u201cIt was almost as if because my partner and I were women, and maybe even Black, that our peers thought we weren\u2019t doing high-risk medicine, that we just do homespun, pat you on the back, tell you that you\u2019re loved kind of medicine,\u201d Mahone says. \u201cOne doctor told me, \u2018You just make patients feel good.\u2019 That\u2019s a great thing to say, but there is medicine involved here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her special clinical interests included preconceptual counseling and prevention of premature births. In 1997, patient Bobbi McCaughey walked into Mahone\u2019s office at Iowa Health 10 weeks pregnant and with seven heartbeats. Mahone gave her all of her options. McCaughey wanted to have all seven babies, so Mahone started researching. What she found was that the delivery of seven healthy babies had never been done. There were cases of sextuplets, but the outcomes had been poor.<\/p>\n

Mahone called doctors who had performed similar deliveries, but no one was able to provide any new information. At 30 and a half weeks, Mahone determined it was time to deliver the babies by Caesarean section. She had a team of eight people in the delivery room, including her partner, and another 40 medical staff from every specialty waiting just outside the operation room to do the post-delivery care. Speed was of utmost importance so that the last baby wasn\u2019t without blood supply.<\/p>\n

Mahone and her partner became the first to deliver seven healthy babies. The media attention was out of proportion to what they accomplished, which wasn\u2019t anything special, Mahone says. They didn\u2019t invent lifesaving equipment or a drug. Mahone did what she did for all of her patients\u2014listen with empathy, make a plan, ensure her patient could follow through on what was being asked, and adjust the plan accordingly. She\u2019s not being humble, she says, just truthful.<\/p>\n

What she did accomplish, Mahone acknowledges, is less tangible.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe outpouring of love and pride from the Black community was incredible,\u201d Mahone says. Around the world, people sent them baby dolls\u2014in sets of seven\u2014and wrote letters. One woman told Mahone in a letter that she saw the press conference, and when two Black women walked out\u2014\u201cshe said she was dancing around her living room, screaming,\u201d Mahone says. College and high school students wrote to them, too, asking about their stories as Black women in medical school and the professional medical community. Mahone was happy to oblige\u2014and still has so much story left to tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a doctor specializing in high-risk pregnancy, Paula Mahone empowered her patients to have a voice in their medical care\u2014whether they were having one baby or seven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":3826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[54973],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87521],"class_list":["post-3825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight"],"yoast_head":"\nPaula Mahone \u201980 | Goucher Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As a doctor specializing in high-risk pregnancy, Paula Mahone empowered her patients to have a voice in their medical care.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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