Ohio Sheriff Pulls Over Speeder…Minutes Later, Helps Deliver Amish Baby
Last year, a PA State Deputy saved a 3-year-old Amish girl in a runaway buggy. Here’s another feel-good story – also involving law enforcement, Amish, and a speeding vehicle.
Deputy Travis Goodwin of the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office made a traffic stop to remember Friday. From Fox8 Cleveland:
“There is no such thing as a routine traffic stop, that’s for sure,” Goodwin said with a chuckle. “Yep, Friday is a good example.”
He tells us he had no idea that when he stopped a vehicle for speeding early Friday morning on Mayfield Road that he would be helping to deliver a baby a few minutes later.
Goodwin’s dash camera video shows him walking up to the vehicle seconds after the traffic stop. He was quickly told the driver was taking an Amish couple to the hospital and the female passenger was ready to give birth.
He then ran to his cruiser to get supplies, and about a minute later he was helping the woman’s husband deliver a baby girl.
“A beautiful baby girl ,” deputy Goodwin said. He said a few minutes after the baby was born the ambulance arrived.
It’s reported that mom and the baby are both in good shape. Deputy Goodwin was given a gold stork pin by the Sheriff to wear on his uniform. He’ll have a story to tell for years to come. So will that Amish family.

That is unusual
Most Amish women are very prudish when it comes to men outside their close family. I can only imagine how she might have felt having an unrelated male stranger deliver her baby.
Amish delivery
You don’t even have to be Amish! I’ve helped deliver a number of babies and some women, Amish and English, won’t cooperate at first. Then in the last parts of labor everything about modesty goes out the window! I couldn’t imagine a male sheriff. I see what you’re saying though.
I literally cried reading this. And I’ve cried at a few deliveries as well.
Respect for the mother's feelings about her body matters
A woman does not become an object to be stripped of her clothes at the preferences of and for the ease of others merely because she’s in labour.
The people who attend a birth, medical professionals or whatever else, should be there to serve the mother and child, and that includes respecting the mother’s feelings.
Modesty is hardly logically relevant when giving birth, but it ceases to matter when the mother feels that it has ceased to matter, not according to the decision of someone else.
It’s for the medical professionals or whatever to work around a mother’s sense of modesty or discomfort or shyness, not to complain that she’s “not co-operating” with them!
The people assisting her are there to co-operate with her and help her give birth, not the other way around.
The medicalisation of birth and the treatment of women giving birth as no-longer-autonomous-humans can be a bad issue. (Removing someone’s clothes, or insisting he or she remove them, is a classic way of stripping a person of agency and autonomy. I realise that in some professions people get so used to seeing people not fully dressed that automatic awareness of this perhaps loses its force in habit).
Deputy delivers baby
Since they were on their way to the hospital one can assume she was familiar with being checked by doctors/nurses/etc. Speaking for myself..a non amish woman, I would welcome the help because my husband would be useless 🙂
Embarrassed
I’m not Amish and I would have been mortified! But, as the lady says above….. At the point where the baby is on it’s way out….. You just want it to be Done! And baby healthy and safe of course!!! I feel real sorry for the young mama, I hope she is handling it all ok….