Rochel Vail's most memorable summer vacation took place in 1981 in upstate New York when she delivered a baby all alone, with no training, in the bathroom of the Ramapo service area off the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway.

Vail, 24 years old at the time, had piled into her old car with her husband and three children and was driving her pregnant friend, who had gone into labor, back to the city from a summer vacation, so that the friend could give birth with the help of her doctor.

"At one point, we stopped so she could use the bathroom, and as soon as we got in the bathroom, she said, 'The baby's coming now!' So I just stood there with my hands open, and I caught."

Vail, now 50, described that moment as the most incredible thing she had ever seen in her life. Her four-year-old son, who had been waiting for his mother outside the gas station bathroom, said, "Wow, babies come from the bathroom!"

Back in her $50 jalopy, Vail could think of nothing else; she had to do this again. After returning home, she decided to become an emergency medical technican (EMT).

She took the certification exam and passed in 1984, taking a class once a week with other Orthodox women in Flatbush.

"Emergency births are part of what I saw as an EMT, so I became chummy with doctors and I made friends with the people at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, and they said I could hang around the birth ward and help out with deliveries," she said.

Vail then began accompanying her sisters to their births, and then her friends, and then her friends' friends. Finally she officially became a doula by taking a course with the organization Doulas of North America, and has attended almost 1,200 births.

"Doula" translates to "woman's caregiver" in ancient Greek, and that sums up Vail's services to the women she helps. Although she is not a nurse and cannot administer drugs to a woman in labor, she does position techniques and massage, and provides emotional support to the mother, whether it is her first or 10th child.

She eventually hooked up with a team of doctors and midwives at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, to whom she still brings her clients.

Her mentor, Jackie Kushner, then a midwife at Beth Israel, taught Vale that birth is a very natural process, and that doctors and midwives don't deliver babies; they catch.

"When I work with patients, I get comments like, 'What are you, exactly?'" Vail said.

The baby business is booming in the Crown Heights Lubavitch community of 14,000, and has been for decades. Lubavitch women usually marry around the age of 20 to a man in his early 20s, and the couple starts to have babies nine months later. The average first-time mother that Vail works with is 21 years old.

"The older generation had more children," Vail lamented. "Most of my friends have between eight and 10 children. Nowadays, unfortunately, the average is around six children."