With the board of St. Vincent’s Medical Centers having voted Tuesday night to close the hospital, New York is losing essential community services, some downtown history — and an obstetrics department some considered unique in the city. It was exceptionally midwife-friendly, and run by Dr. George Mussalli, whose own practice describes itself as a proponent of “minimally invasive obstetrics.”

The range of options at St. Vincent’s, in Greenwich Village, was about as wide as any expecting mother could want. You need a scheduled Caesarean? By all means. You want to give birth at home on your futon with incense burning and monks chanting on your iPod? So be it. St. Vincent’s is — was — considered the hospital of choice for home midwives in the event that they needed to transfer a patient. “We’ve just lost our oasis in the city,” said Elan McAllister, the president of Choices in Childbirth, which supports the full range of childbearing options for women.

Image Dr. George Mussalli, left, and Dr. Jaqueline Worth at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Credit... Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

In a city where you can live however you want, as long as it’s safe — and sometimes even if it’s not — it seems absurd that there are so few places where women can give birth however they want, as long as it’s safe.

The lack of choice extends far beyond natural childbirth. Most women prefer to avoid C-sections, but pregnant New Yorkers imagining their first blissful weeks of motherhood should incorporate, just to be realistic, the strong possibility that they’ll be recovering from major abdominal surgery: From 2000 to 2007, the city’s Caesarean rate soared 36 percent. Women here are now looking at 1 in 3 odds that they will be struggling with stairs in those crucial early days of parenting. But St. Vincent’s C-section rate has been inching down in recent years — and Dr. Mussalli has been committed to lowering them even further. The hospital’s C-section rate for 2009, according to its records, was 24 percent.