From 1950 until 2001, Lovie Beard Shelton practiced midwifery in eastern North Carolina homes, delivering babies to black, white, Mennonite, and hippie women, to those too poor to afford a hospital birth, and to a few rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased. Lovie is a chronicle of Shelton's life and work, which spanned enormous changes in midwifery and in the ways women give birth.