Do You Know The History (HERstory!) Of Midwifery (and Birth In General) In The USA?
The history of midwifery includes many ups and downs and ins and outs.. Kind of like a spiral… The same sort of process that birth takes that we talk about with our clients.
It’s not a straight line and perhaps we as midwives have gone through a collective transition period or dark night of the soul in order to get to a place right now where we know we need to create a vision for our future that is more aligned with positive expansion for humanity as a whole.
Birth was once a community or social event at home with support before, during and after from women from the community. Even as recently as my maternal grandmother’s generation, babies were being born at home under the care of community midwives.
My maternal grandmother WAS born at home under the care of a midwife, actually, (though her siblings were born at home with a neighborhood doctor who lived a block away). When it came time for my grandmother to give birth, just 16 years after HER own birth, she gave birth in a hospital, though.
Once men started being educated in medicine in colleges and becoming more prevalent in towns and communities across the country as the local doctor (who did house calls!), they would be called upon occasionally by midwives to help at complicated or emergency home births.
Men eventually started being trained in schools in midwifery when schools started having more specializations, and they started attending more home births.
To help educate these men more easily, clinical birth hospitals or centers were opened in large cities so male midwifery or obstetrical students could learn from experiencing large numbers of poor people giving birth. This also coincided with the general move of a lot of folks from the country communities into the cities, where people had less support from their community and were far from their families.
Eventually this whole process snowballed into educated medical men wanting to save women from the pain of labor, and twilight sleep was invented, which could only be performed in a hospital. Upper class women began to want to give birth there in hospitals instead of in their homes, to avoid the pain of giving birth and to be removed from the process in a pretty significant way.
After twighlight sleep had been implemented for a while, the management of the labor process became an important (to trained doctors) aspect of the birth process in hospitals, plotting birth on a timeline and managing every stage of the labor process instead of letting it flow physiologically in any sense of the word.
Once the medical industry (doctors) organized themselves into national groups and organizations in order to make even more money from the birth process, they realized that midwives were a threat to their success and made every effort to paint midwives as inferior, even dirty and uneducated, in order for women to stop trusting their neighborhood midwife and to feel safer in the hands of the “educated and clean” male doctor. All of this with the backing of a national organization and against individual midwives who were not organized into such organizations at all.
Midwives were prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license and generally made into a “witch” which was then “hunted” and driven out of existence, practically.
Thankfully, because birthing women demanded it, there was a resurgence of midwifery in the 70s and later, but midwives were still hunted and persecuted. In an effort to be seen as valuable and useful in the eyes of the powers that be and of society, they organized into groups and implemented certifications and other standards of practice that were modeled from the medical model.
Nurse midwives were invented in order to save doctors and hospitals money and to be “doctor helpers.”
Midwifery licensure was created in order to make midwives feel safe and valuable and validated, but also to keep them under restrictions and keep them beholden to outside systems (the state and regulatory bodies) instead of to the women they served.
This is pretty much where we are presently. Midwives feel the need to get licensed and get permission from the state in order to practice in a way that the state has deemed optimal. The states decide what is optimal based on input from medical personnel, doctors and medically trained midwives. There is no input from the women being served by midwives.
Midwives are still feeling the “sister wound” and will often turn each other in or report on other midwives who aren’t practicing in a way that is completely aligned with the state regulations, even if the state regulations aren’t what is best for some individual women and families. Doctors and medical personnel sometimes turn midwives in as well, just as in the early days of the midwifery witch hunts!
There is an underground effort, though, of midwives who are being trained just as any other midwife would be (though perhaps less in the western medical way and more in a holistic way), but refusing to practice under a license and to answer to the state instead of answering to the women they serve.
My Vision For The Future
My vision for the future includes women who are in their power when they give birth, and all birth attendants viewing them as the smartest person in the room. We have all spent too much time looking outside of ourselves, to outside authorities and medical professionals, to tell us what is going wrong and right in our own bodies, minds, and souls.
Educating women on how to return to that place of being grounded and connected to their inner wisdom and how to retain that throughout the entire childbearing year and beyond is a BIG part of my purpose here.
Educating birth workers on how to return to that place of holding the space and on how to release all the negative programming of birth being a dangerous event that needs to be managed or that we as birth workers need to save women from anything. Women are so powerful, and it doesn’t take long after witnessing women giving birth completely in their power to change and shift as a birth worker and release any notion that may hint at otherwise.
I also envision truly supporting women in a community-driven way again. Like they did in the time of my great grandma! Mothers helpers would go to help a new mom for weeks after she gave birth, helping with the laundry and other kids and keeping up the home. This is a big reason why I try so hard to establish a solid community here where I live, holding regular gatherings of friends, in order to form this foundational community connection that is necessary for the type of community support women need after birth.
By maintaining this women-centered practice outside of any governing or controlling system, on the community level, we can make sure we are honoring the women we serve in all of the ways we can and not letting ourselves get stuck within a patriarchal system that was designed to keep us small and disconnected from our power and from the natural rhythms of life.
I really feel that there is an awakening happening and women are in the position to want to heal past familial trauma in general and birth trauma specifically, from this and past generations, and they are wanting to change the way they live their lives, including how they give birth! Thankfully there haven’t been TOO many generations of women giving birth in a way that traumatizes them, so it’s not an impossible ask, but there is at the same time much work to be done on an individual and collective level.
I want to support women as they come into their power again, and I think changing the way we live and the way we give birth in these ways will change the world in a positive way for our children and their children and for the next seven generations.
Now is the time to work on this as a collective!
Midwifery history shows me that women have been encouraged to disconnect from their true power as birthers and bringers of life. Now it feels as if we’re circling back on the spiral as a collective to really put women in the center and to encourage us all (midwives AND birthing women) to reconnect with our power so we can have the type of birthing experiences that will benefit us most as individuals and as a society.
I am looking forward to playing my part in this process!
