"I don't know how many babies I've helped. It's somewhere between 5 and 12 mothers per class, six times a year, for 323/4 years. I'll have to do the math sometime," she says. At its lowest, that number hits close to 1,000.

"I just love it when someone tells me, '[Mary Drew], I felt like I could do anything afterward.' When a woman is able to have a natural childbirth experience, it really is an amazing thing and so many women don't have the chance to experience that," she says.

Drew's experience also helps when she's asked questions by her sometimes nervous students. When prompted to talk about their biggest birth fear, most of the women in Drew's class said they were afraid their water would break in public. Drew eased those concerns by telling her class that in 33 years only two of her students have had their water break in public. For one of those women, the event happened during Drew's class.