There was a time when birth was sacred, when women, birthing bodies, and babies were held with reverence, love, sacred care and ancestral wisdom. Birth is a ceremony rooted in song, nature, spirit, and community. The childbirth journey historically has been guided by midwives anchored with calm nervous systems who brought balance, harmony and ancestral knowing into homes and birthing rooms, who walked with medicine and care as healers, storytellers, and spiritual protectors, carrying the knowledge of generations in their bones, hands, and hearts.
Before medical industrial maternal health systems rooted in capitalism and forced regulation, birth was seen as a sacred, harmonious, and a joyful communal experience guided with integrity for new life, where mothers and babies thrived. Before birth became controlled, commodified and capitalized, it was honored through earth-based, Indigenous practices. Midwifery has always existed—long before it was institutionalized or licensed—passed from midwife to midwife, through oral tradition and sacred apprenticeship.
The original midwives didn’t need to dissect or dominate to understand birth. They listened. They trusted. They supported the divine dialogue between mother and child, the spirit world and the physical realm. They didn’t rely on fear to gain compliance or money—they relied on integrity, calling, and the sacred responsibility of care. Midwifery was rooted in reciprocity, community, and spirit—not capitalism.
““We are not in a Maternal Health Crisis. We are in a Maternal Health Systems Crisis. The crisis is with the system, not the bodies of women and birthing people.””
Our bodies know how to conceive, sustain, birth, and heal. What is broken is the system that denies this knowing, replacing presence with protocol, and reverence with regulation.
The wisdom of traditional midwives wasn’t lost; it was stolen, erased, and suppressed through colonization, industrialization, and systemic exclusion. In Uganda and across Africa, midwives performed cesareans before they were ever recorded in Europe. And yet, Western systems took this knowledge, claimed it, and used it to criminalize the very people who birthed it.
We cannot call midwives the solution if we still reject those not trained in systems that once erased them. We cannot heal a maternal health crisis by only counting licensed practitioners, while ignoring the cultural, spiritual, and community-rooted midwives who have served for generations.
To honor our lineage and reclaim what was taken, I teach a framework that supports a return to traditional, spiritual, and community-rooted midwifery. It’s grounded in ancestral wisdom, sacred apprenticeship, nervous system regulation, and cultural wholeness—elements that have long been excluded from dominant systems. This work isn’t about rejecting the clinical model, but rather completing the circle by restoring what our communities have always known.
A liberated midwifery future must acknowledge the harm regulation has caused, make space for sacred knowledge, and reconnect with the roots that made midwifery possible in the first place.
The time of remembering is here.
We are calling birth back to the center.
Back to culture.
Back to spirit.
Back to the sacred.
To learn more about my work reclaiming traditional midwifery knowledge and supporting spiritual pathways for midwives across the globe, visit TheMidwiferyFolklorist.com. This work is deeply aligned with NACPM’s vision of a midwifery model that honors lineage, centers community, and builds a future rooted in justice and liberation.