Hurricane Melissa was bearing down on St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica, but 11 women were still in labor, and the three midwives on duty barely had time to look up from their work. “It was like a conveyor belt” of newborn babies, said Deveree Stewart, president of the Caribbean Regional Midwives Association, remembering the stories a midwife on duty had told her about that October evening. Another midwife told her about caring for a patient throughout her delivery at Cornwall Regional Hospital in St. James Parish – even though Hurricane Melissa was tearing the roof partway off as she worked. “This is where one could say that the art of midwifery came in,” Stewart told Direct Relief. “You’re in a space [where] you do not know what is happening to your home, but you have to give care.” In the aftermath of the Category 5 storm, which cut a wide swathe of devastation across western Jamaica, Jamaican midwives were horrified by the damage. Black River Hospital, in the parish of St. Elizabeth, was all but gone.…