It takes eight hours, on average, for a baby to be born. But seven weeks ago, Elizabeth Eldridge delivered her daughter in two hours and 20 minutes, a feat she credits largely to Wareham midwife Louise Bastarache.

“She really walked me through the process at a time I felt really overwhelmed, and didn’t have control over what was going on,” Eldridge said of giving birth to her daughter under Bastarache’s guiding hand. “She gave me back that control, and that made me feel better.”

The mother of two lives in Boston, but, halfway through her pregnancy with her daughter, Eldridge decided that something just didn’t feel right with the healthcare providers she was seeing in Boston. She didn’t feel the same “click” she had with Bastarache when the midwife helped her deliver her son two years ago.

“I quickly learned there is no one like her within driving distance, so we did the hour and 20 minute drive for all my appointments,” Eldridge said.

Bastarache works as an independent practitioner at Tobey Hospital. She is connected to the hospital through the Southcoast Physicians Network, but is not employed by Southcoast. She is a common presence in the halls of Tobey’s maternity unit, in which maternity unit resource nurse Joyce Hyslip-Ikkela said she has been working with Bastarache for 20 years.

“Louise is very, very special,” said Hyslip-Ikkela, whose babies Bastarache also delivered. “She does about a third of all our deliveries. She provides exceptional care, and knows all her patients like a book.”

Unlike other midwives in the area, Bastarache describes her practice as “natural.”

“Most midwives do the same things doctors do and take a more medical approach,” Bastarache said. “My patients don’t have epidurals. They don’t want the, ‘Oh, dearie, it’s time for the epidural.’ They use the tools they learned with me – visualization, going into the tub, changing position.”

If a patient has a more serious condition Bastarache said she will employ more medical techniques and equipment, such as IVs or blood pressure medication, but even then she uses those avenues as little as possible. Eldridge herself had to be induced into labor with her daughter, due to Eldridge’s low blood platelet count.

“Because Louise does slow inductions it took three days, but I was very comfortable. We tried one thing one day and another thing another day – at one point she even turned off the induction medication to let my body rest,” Eldridge remembered. “If I had stayed up in Boston, I don’t think they would have let me hang out that long. I probably would have had a C-section on Thursday.”

When Bastarache began her practice in the 1970s, she was a nurse practitioner who flirted with the idea of natural medicine.

“I wanted to advocate for women,” Bastarache said. “I wanted to ... do midwifery, so I could continue that effort to help women give birth the way they want to.”

Bastarache describes her techniques as very “family-centric,” in which the health care provider and the family get to know each other very well. She also makes sure to keep the mother and baby are close throughout the entire process, with such methods as skin-to-skin contact, in which the baby is placed on the mother’s chest immediately after the baby is born.

Although she practices minimal medical intervention, Bastarache acknowledges the perks of having mothers deliver at Tobey Hospital.

“I have the best of both worlds, because … it gives those women the chance to experience a home birth in the safety net of the hospital,” Bastarache said.

Bastarache does not plan to retire for another 10 years or so, but she does acknowledge the job is a “very time-intensive job that isn’t popular anymore.”

“[Natural birth] isn’t used in many places, because it’s not cost-effective from a business point of view,” Bastarache said. “But, from a personal point of view, to prevent infections, and promote the health of the mom and the baby, it’s proven.”

“You can’t treat women like cattle going in and out of the hospital. You have to personalize it,” she continued. “It’s not just delivering the baby. It’s helping the woman with the whole process, and giving her the right to say what she wants to do.”

Though 10 years seems awfully far off, Eldridge said she does not know what expectant women in the area will do without the “one in a million” midwife.

“The heart and soul she puts into it is ridiculous, and she is on call 24 hours a day for all her patients,” Eldridge said.

Hyslip-Ikkela said Bastarache goes “above and beyond” for anyone she can, regardless of if they are her patients, or a colleague’s family member.

“If she can do something for you, she will,” Hyslip-Ikkela said. “We call her St. Louise, because she is truly an amazing person.”