Each chapter builds on the question: What if much of what we’ve been told about birth and our bodies isn’t actually true?

The monitoring and dismissal that defined my hospital births were modern symptoms of birth as it was entwined with the rapid changes of industrialization and medical professionalization. Throughout most of human history, especially pre 1750, birth was managed not by institutions, but by women.

For millennia, women cultivated relationships with the land and each other, channeling a spiritual and practical wisdom that guided their roles in the community. Women maintained economy through shared gardening, bartering, weaving, and birth attending. Their work was so entwined with society that it was rarely documented. And when it was, written works rarely survived the passage of time. Women’s knowledge carried authority within their communities. But where authority and agency proliferates, surveillance is all but inevitable.

Most knowledge was passed down orally by midwives, herbalists, and healers to their children and gifted community members. When many of these women were persecuted in witch trials, or shackled during global slave trade, or erased by colonizers, their oral traditions were lost. Much of what we understand today is myth and legend, and the stories that we can glean from the few remaining written works.

Many ancient and Indigenous societies believed in the sanctity of earth, and a balance of body and mind. My own documented lineage traces back to people we would call ancient pagans. Amongst my pagan European ancestors, the placenta was wrapped and buried to honor the connection between mother and earth. It was necessary to be handled with extreme care. Andean women return the placenta to Pachamama; African and African American traditions also held the placenta as spiritually significant and protective, burying it to safeguard the mother and child.

The stories passed down of rituals and birth, often informed by Earth herself, remind me how much of women’s knowledge has managed to survive without official record. And when there is existing record, our power comes from learning it again so we can continue to share it. One such history is written as an Ancient Greek legend, about the mother of healing, Agnodice.

Agnodice embodies the ancient bridge of midwives and physicians. Agnodice was born when women and slaves were forbidden to study medicine in Greece by law. She was driven by her passion to help women who were dying without care, because the government had outlawed midwives, leaving women to birth on their own. This would serve as a foreshadow of the importance of the presence of trained attendants for better birth outcomes. Her story reflects the lengths women have gone to heal others. Agnodice traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, where women were allowed to study, and completed her medical training there.

Returning to Greece, she cut her hair, dressed as a man, and convinced the male physician Herophilus to train her. Now practicing, Agnodice went to attend her first birth where a laboring woman initially declined her services. When Agnodice revealed that she was in fact a woman, she was allowed to participate in the woman’s labor and birth.

Word quickly spread, and soon numerous women were seeking out Agnodice for care. This infuriated her male colleagues who soon became very suspicious of Agnodice’s success in practice. Physicians accused her of seducing her patients. Because of these charges, Agnodice was arrested and then put on trial. Agnodice explained her womanhood and then confirmed it by revealing her body. The men decidedly cleared her of the seduction charges, only to then pivot to charges of breaking the law for illegally practicing medicine as a woman.

The women of the community who Agnodice had attended in birth were furious about the charges. To show their solidarity they refused to have sex with their husbands until she was pardoned. To further prove their anger about the situation, and how serious they were, they proceeded to stand on the steps of the courthouse, threatening to commit suicide unless she was freed.

Very soon, Agnodice was pardoned and released.

The sisterhood demonstrated their collective strength which saved not just one woman, but many, by facilitating woman’s legal practice of medicine in Ancient Greece. This propped the door for many other women to access the study of healing arts. As historian Helen King writes, Agnodice was “not a midwife, but the pioneer who made it possible for women to study medicine as a whole.”

Midwives throughout time and across cultures weren’t just skilled birth attendants, they also often took quiet vigil at the deathbed, and healed members of the community. Ancient midwives and women physicians were often one and the same, paving the way for women to learn medicine and midwifery after them.

In the ancient world, the culture of childbirth was a powerful social construct, built by and for women. Evidence about birth in antiquity illustrates the picture of a woman-centered, supportive experience centered exclusively around women. For differing cultural reasons, men simply weren’t invited into the birth room. Not until that taboo was broken, beginning with the age of enlightenment, did the presence of men in birth rooms shift.

Midwives were responsible for completing pelvic exams, monitoring pregnancies and labor progression, and attending women in birth with watchful waiting and presence. Their labor skills depended on hands, not instruments, and involved applying oils to the perineum, gently stretching tissues, and abdominal massage to coax labor. Some midwives were renowned for turning breech babies. Birth occurred at home and was assisted by women friends and family members.

As labor progressed and crowning approached, women’s support systems would descend into the labor space to chat, chant, employ spiritual or protective rituals, and occasionally act as physical labor support. They were known to hold up or otherwise support birthing woman to facilitate passage of the baby.

The lower classes depended on family and friends, and neighbors, to manage labor and attend birth. Nobility and the wealthy classes, however, were able to afford the services of skilled members in the household, such as trained maidservants or nurses. Birth attendants were often chosen for their skills or extensive experience.

Community midwives were often elderly experienced women who had already experienced their own births, who then apprenticed younger women in the skill. Some believe that midwives were chosen based on their physical attributes, like soft hands with long, slim fingers.

Gynecological treatises and historical works shed light on how women professionally trained in the ancient era. The Kahun (Gynecological) Papyrus, dated around 1900-1800 B.C, recorded treatments for fertility, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion.

Greek Soranus of Ephesus, wrote Gynaecology for the practice of midwifery. In it, he describes the ideal midwife as literate, smart, agile, dedicated, and possessing long slender fingers with trimmed nails. He also detailed a midwife’s tools, including her own personal, portable birthing stool.

In addition to midwifery, notable women were also successful herbalists. Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled as an Egyptian king, tended luscious botanical gardens and held extensive knowledge of medicinal plants. But while knowledge traveled across sisters and through gardens, men were nearly always there to intercept it.

Hatshepsut encouraged the training of women practitioners, having developed multiple medical schools to encourage training. For centuries she was lost to the ages until she was rediscovered in the 1800s. Her name had been literally buried for centuries by her own heir and successor. Hatshepsut’s son and future king struck her name from the official register of kings and ordered her statues be torn down after her death. He even had her monuments defaced to hide her existence and ensure the seamless transition of his line.

Numerous remedies and treatments originated with women, and some treatises originated from their hands. Erasing the origin of women’s knowledge was the key to controlling it. Their wisdom, once sacred and shared, grew too powerful. But even when their names were forgotten, the medicine lived on. The information still managed to travel across borders, tucked away in minds, demonstrated by hands, and shared in the moment when needed. And yet, with the passage of time, skilled women’s names would fade away into the footnotes.

As the classical world gave way to the medieval, women continued to support one another in childbirth. Midwives were called “wise women”, and were highly regarded birth workers continuing to go by the names obstetrix, or for the french, the sage-femme.

One such notable healer was Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine abbess and mystic. She practiced gynecology and wrote extensively about medicine, herbs, gemstones, incantations, and employed water healing. Hildegard’s work in particular was able to survive appropriation and destruction because she was recognized by men as a “holy woman” of religion, and therefore a step above her peers. Particularly she was elevated above the usual perception of woman through the Madonna complex: woman as mother, woman as whore. Even in Ancient Egypt, where women had rights like divorce and keeping land, women could still be regarded as goddess and simultaneous scheming whore. Religious association conferred a protection on Hildegard’s work, that others did not have.

For many centuries women’s authority continued to survive in through their garden and associated herbal remedies, and through their place in the labor room. Times were changing however, and sovereignty was slipping as something darkly religious brewed. The fervent, zealous oppression of women healers and midwives was on the horizon.

As the Dark Ages progressed, men found few barriers to accessing improved status in society through male benefits and means. They accomplished this with access to education, which conveniently barred women. Male physicians began to sow seeds of distrust and spoke with ire about the women who cared for women, referring to them as vulgares or illiterati mulieres. They did not appreciate, and were often bothered by, the application of “intrusive” folk therapies over their emerging science.

The first major encroachment became a moral crusade fueled by the church and religious fear. Male practitioners began to feature women as diabolic, especially if they were providing herbal remedies or assisting with reproductive matters, which could culminate in accusations of witchcraft. As fear festered, persecution and accusations swiftly followed. Tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were burned or hung for alleged witchcraft during the Dark Ages. Women healers and midwives were frequently singled out and convicted. Often these were older women without husbands and heirs. Their work in the devilry of the Earth and reproductive care, coupled by their ownership of land that the state wanted to assume, put them especially at risk.

Elimination of knowledgeable community women meant the eradication of the sisterhood and practices passed down through oral tradition. It was the intentional silencing of individual women’s voices, the systematic dismantling of women’s work.

The Dark Ages was also a notorious era that saw the erasure of woman’s written knowledge which until then had still existed. Passages that were penned by women were notated as “femme” and then struck from prominent works. As writings disappeared, many European regions continued to engage in the practice of barring women from the study of medicine, a move that echoed the decision of the ancient Greeks to bar women from medicine.

As fear continued to drive decision-making, religious regulation sought to rule out the possibility of witchcraft. The chance that women who would baptize babies could be in cahoots with the devil, made that fear all the more potent. So by the mid-1500s, the licensing of midwives became the duty of episcopal bishops. Two hundred years of this practice eventually led to a phase out by the 1700s, but not without centuries of negative impact. Religious institutions regulating women’s health care sowed doubt about their abilities and agendas, rooting fear where there was once certainty and self-trust.

During this transition phase, numerous European countries maintained their skilled midwives and promoted their practice, though they did so through regulation and oversight. Many European countries, some stretching back into the 1500s, established formal midwifery training programs, and offering salaries and training.

Across centuries and civilizations, women carried the wisdom of healing in their hands, and through their histories and lineages. Even as their authority was narrowed, their work endured in the ways that it had for centuries, millennia even. Now however, it was more cautiously enacted under watchful institutions.

As regulation replaced tradition, midwifery shifted from a communal calling to a monitored profession. Licensing and regulatory restrictions were enacted to achieve more than a proposed standardization of care, these were tools used to leverage a centralization of oversight and power. Authority that had once lived within women’s networks began moving outward to be managed and mandated by the church first, followed by the law and the state.

When European powers crossed oceans, they did not leave their hierarchies behind, they exported and accelerated them. In colonies across the Americas and beyond, birth would become another site of governance. Indigenous midwives, African birth attendants, and enslaved women carried deep generational knowledge, but their authority would be scrutinized and eventually undermined according to European standards.

The displacement of women from birth occurred gradually over centuries, moving alongside conquest, commerce, doctrine, and the law. By the time hospitals and medicine rose as symbols of modern progress in the early 20th century, the groundwork had already been laid. Authority had shifted and trust had been redefined. The hospital didn’t begin the transfer of power, the colony did.

What surprises you most about the history of midwives and women healers?

Thank you for reading my book REPRO MYTH! New chapters are published Thursdays.

If this resonated, Subscribe to follow the full series as it’s released

Next Week: Chapter 3: Colonial Midwifery

Works Cited:

• Bennet, J. (1991). Lilies of the Hearth

• Brooke, E. Women Healers. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Women_Healers/iObpSCYs5GgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA6&printsec=frontcover

• Dasen, V. Chapter 18 Childbirth and Infancy in Greek and Roman Antiquity. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/79426554.pdf

• Hyginus, Gaius Julius. Fabulae. Translated by Mary Grant. 2019. https://topostext.org/work/206

• King, H. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pg 222

• Soranus, Gynecology, 1.3

• Mark, J. L. (2023). Women in Ancient Egypt. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/623/women-in-ancient-egypt/

• Riddle, J. (1997). Eve’s Herbs

• Romm, A. (2018). Botanical Medicine for Women’s Health. Elsevier Publishing.

• Thiele, A. (2002). Ancient Egyptian Midwifery and Childbirth. https://www.midwiferysupplies.ca/blogs/ancient-midwifery-blog/295322-ancient-egyptian-midwifery-and-childbirth#:~:text=In%20Ancient%20Egypt%20the%20midwife,already%20lived%20in%20the%20household

• Tsoucalas, G., Karamanou, M., Sgzantos, M. (2014). In ancient Greece, midwife or gynaecologist-obstetrician? (pg. 547). https://doi.org/10.3109/01443615.2014.911834

• Tyldesley, J. (2024). Hatsheput ruler of Egypt. Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hatshepsut

Each chapter builds on the question: What if much of what we’ve been told about birth and our bodies isn’t actually true?

Two years later, in my next pregnancy, I promised myself I would do better. This time I labored at home first. I rested and took it easy, laughed with my husband while watching Monty Python. I believed my body would tell me when it was time, and it certainly did.

As I was laying in bed around 11 PM counting my contractions, a big one came through causing my water to break with a familiar popping sensation. And once again adrenaline-fueled anxiety consumed me instead of grounded calm.

When we made it to triage (at a different major medical center than my first delivery) I was told I had to wait for the medical student to assess me. He entered and announced that he needed a sample. I assured him that I knew the difference between amniotic fluid and urine. He gave me a shifty glance. I could see behind his glasses that he was sizing me up as an unreliable narrator of my body. He needed proof, and he needed the sample, which he ultimately got.

While we waited, a bleary-eyed nurse practitioner walked in for a mandatory cervical exam. Just as she was entering the room, I was hit with a big contraction. As I clenched my teeth and groaned, she rolled her eyes. After she checked me, she declared assuredly:

“You’re 4 centimeters dilated” then left.

Measuring dilation is a valuable form of hospital currency. It’s quantifiable and trackable, objective gold, even though it’s a very subjective exam depending on who’s checking.

Four centimeters was not nearly enough to justify all that racket. They send people home at four centimeters all the time. The hidden code in the eye roll was validation of what the nurse practitioner assumed. Four centimeters is nothing, quit putting on a show. And be thankful we don’t send you back where you came from.

Once again, I wasn’t prepared to be on this side of the rails. I knew this culture, the one that subtly judges women laboring loudly. A place of confinement where powerful peer pressure is implied through tone and body language alone. Noise and lack of control aren’t feminine features. You need to be put back in your rightful, submissive place.

And soon I was begging to be put into mine. The epidural was the only coping mechanism I knew to ask for. I didn’t ask to get in a tub of warm water or for other pain management options. They certainly weren’t offered. For the second time, I hadn’t considered having a doula or writing a birth plan. I still believed in my soul that women who did that were trouble. Compliant women, good girls, get rewarded. I still hadn’t learned that it was okay to be a little trouble.

The epidural again blessed me by melting away that feeling of intense pressure and searing abdominal pain. Three contractions later and my discomfort was gone. As I settled into my chlorinated nest of hospital sheets, I closed my eyes to rest. That’s when a wave of nausea and lightheadedness hit me.

“I think I’m gonna throw up” I said.

My night nurse, brand new to her job, hurried off to find nausea medication. As soon as she left, I passed out, white as my hospital sheet. The epidural had caused my blood pressure to drop too fast; sudden hypotension which is a known complication.

My blood pressure was 70/30 and I was non-responsive. But our second daughter was sturdy and the fetal monitor continued to pulse steadily. My husband looked around expectantly for help to enter and saw none. But then in the shadows of the room he spotted a lone anesthesiologist charting with his back to us. My husband pleaded for help.

The doctor looked over his shoulder, shrugged, and went back to charting. The fetal monitor was stable, the to-do list was long, the chart unfinished, and I wasn’t coding.

In short, I was not a priority.

Soon, my nurse came back in, understood what was happening, and grabbed some fluids to resuscitate me. Our second daughter was born the next day.

Once again, a healthy baby and successful delivery. A legally non-implicating medical chart. Clinically, both births were successes. Psychologically, they registered as losses. Everything had gone according to the hospital’s plan both times. I trusted the hospital’s plan enough not to make my own.

But then why did I feel this way?

In my first birth, fetal distress triggered immediate escalation and an entire team rushing in. And in the second, maternal collapse did not. Same patient, same protocols, different urgency.

This was no coincidence. It was the result of a system prioritizing a fetal monitor over the fully-fledged adult woman attached to the other end.

In modern obstetrics, babies are often treated as the primary outcome and women as the vessel. Our dignity is treated as conditional and flexible, and our voices preferably silent. When we’re too loud or plan to be centered, that’s a problem.

I was trained in this system, and for a long time I followed it blindly. I was a willing participant, because I wanted to please, be quiet, feminine, and compliant like society had taught me. But after passing through that system and experiencing how it crashes down on women, something inside me cracked.

This story isn’t just about what happened to me in a pair of hospital rooms. It’s about a question I could no longer ignore:

Why does modern birth in America look like this?

Why are women flat on their backs, legs in stirrups, tethered to monitors, surrounded by masked strangers who watch a monitor instead of sitting present with them?

Who decided that this was the safest, smartest, most “advanced” way to usher in life? And who benefits from that design?

Those questions turned me from patient and compliant nurse into a witness and investigator deconstructing the system. Once the floodgate of questions opened, I needed to understand how this system had been built. The history, the protocols, the powerful institutions embedded so deeply that we mistake them for inevitability. And I had to face the truth that what happened to me wasn’t a random experience. It is the norm for so many others.

My births were not personal failures. They were textbook successes inside a system optimized for surveillance and liability.

The systems governing our birth have been built around institutional priorities, and what society prioritizes directly reveals our values. It’s reflected in the way a team sprints in when the monitor drops. And how an eye-roll or shoulder shrug reveals society’s true feelings about a laboring woman.

If we want to understand what birth has become, and what it has cost women, we have to go back, way back. Long before hospital obstetrics consolidated power. Before isolation and routine C-sections were standard. Before birth was reframed as a pathological disaster waiting to happen.

Back to when women weren’t secondary, they were the center, and a midwife was right there beside them.

Did you have a birth experience where you felt managed instead of autonomous? What does it look like to center women in their birth experiences?

Thank you for reading REPRO MYTH! New chapters are published Thursdays.

If this resonated, please consider Subscribing to follow the full book as it is shared

Next: Chapter 2: When Birth Belonged to Women

Each chapter builds on the question: What if much of what we’ve been told about birth and our bodies…isn’t actually true?

The first time I was in labor, half the unit rushed in to stabilize the baby. The second time I was in labor, I was unconscious, and the only thing that moved was a shrugging shoulder. As a nurse, I sensed something wasn’t right. Postpartum, the guilt settled in like proof: I was a failure, or so I thought. But these weren’t personal failures, they were institutional successes.

To come to that terrifying conclusion, I had to reckon with the fact that the system wasn’t broken, it was working exactly as designed. And I had to go back and relive those experiences if I was ever going to move forward.

I was 25 years old, propped on my knees, with my ass in the air. As blood rushed to my face, I thought about how this baby, my daughter, should be here by now. I had spent months staring at her ultrasound pictures, imagining her button nose. Savoring the way her scrunchy head would smell of earthy sweetness and soap after her first bath.

This was my first pregnancy, and I thought it would be joyful, sacred even. But all I felt was anxiety and fear. Lines and tubes tethered me into the hospital bed, monitoring every moment.

I had just fallen asleep after getting an epidural, when I was jolted awake by the rapid commotion that came with the team of strangers in my room. Before I had a chance to shake off my confusion, hands pressed all over, and the room turned sideways.

The team had flipped me over, and I heard a pressured voice remark that the fetal monitor heart rate was dropping. But all I could think about in that moment was my exposed backside. There was no outright mention of “crash c-section” but the statement hit the air like an inevitability. I’d seen plenty of sudden escalations before. It just didn’t dawn on me that I would be the one on the bed careening down the hall into a surgical suite.

Thankfully, after repositioning and an injection the fetal heart rate stabilized. The monitor was once again chirping away happily. Staff filtered out of the room, and just as quickly as it had begun, it was over.

By early morning, they placed me in lithotomy and the resident physician, and her entourage of medical students, delivered me. A healthy baby and no surgery.

According to the chart, everything went perfectly. But somehow, I ended up completely hollow.

Why did I feel like something had just been done to me, not with me?

Just a few hours earlier, I had been working on the other side of the rails. I was on a weekend string of twelve-hour shifts on a mother/baby unit. That day, I had been in labor since the seven AM shift change, but I continued working through it.

I had a bad habit of not listening to my body. Later in life I’d learn that the technical term is a lack of interoception. Before I had the words, I had the conditioning. I’d learned since youth to master holding it. The ways I’ve contorted my pelvic floor would make a physical therapist cringe.

Worse, nobody teaches you in nursing school how to balance unending call lights and phone calls, charting, and medication management, and how to actually self-prioritize. So you hold it, push through, and don’t cause a fuss.

I recognized the contractions early that morning. But I chalked it up to Braxton-Hicks and assumed they would go away. Instead of sitting down, eating, or hydrating, I kept on working. By the three o’clock afternoon shift change I picked up a new patient, and my labor picked up as well.

I leaned over to check the vital signs of a new baby boy, while his recovering mother told me how her water broke at Fazoli’s. And suddenly, as if she had imparted her labor magic on me, my water broke right there. Warm and unmistakable, running down my leg and into my scrubs.

Frozen in place by shock, we locked eyes as my pants soaked through. I awkwardly excused myself, waddled to the door and leapt out. My panic was already rising. This was not something I was ready for. I called my charge nurse from the toilet:

“Hey, uh, so my water just broke.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I could see her flipping through the staffing log. “All right, you better head downstairs.”

I quickly stuffed toilet paper into my pants with shaking hands, grabbed my bag, and then stopped by my patient’s room to say goodbye. When I told her what had just happened, she broke out in uproarious laughter. Pure joy, while I was still silently panicking. I chuckled nervously alongside her, said goodbye, and headed down to labor.

In my naïve, magical thinking, I imagined my birth would be thrilling and fast, probably unmedicated, just like the ones on TV. I felt even more sure of this given the fact that my bag of water had just ruptured dramatically in a patient’s room.

I’d seen plenty of deliveries in my training; had religiously studied my OB textbook. The process was not a mystery to me. But what I didn’t understand was the culture, and what happens when it comes down on a body inside the system.

Because that’s where I was: in the land of deliverance. A place optimized for throughput, risk management, and liability mitigation.

I had chosen a kind midwife for this birth, who I thought would protect my experience. But what I failed to understand was that she practiced inside a hospital system built specifically for surveillance and quick turnaround. When it came to birth, decision-making authority rested with the physicians and administrators who directly oversaw my midwife. Authority certainly was not conferred on laboring women. When it came to choice, protocol overruled.

With a sinking feeling I remembered that my midwife was on vacation. She had gone, and with her went my entire birth plan. I didn’t have a doula or anything written down. I hadn’t even read a birth prep book. I had no idea how different it would feel to be in the bed, instead of beside it.

I labored quietly and compliantly for a few hours. I felt a smidge of confidence when one of the nurses complimented me on how well I was doing. But that was just code for how manageable and quiet I was. Having gone hours now without food and water (protocol wouldn’t allow it), my body was quickly tiring out. My uterus, the prime muscle working hard, was running out of energy to sustain it.

When my husband finally arrived after his hospital shift in the evening, the contractions intensified.

Soon after I was asking for the epidural. And soon my pain receded like the flowing tide of the ocean washing relief over me. The room was quiet again, I was quiet, save for the beep of the machines. I appreciated those few moments of rest, before the chaos of the monitor dropping.

In many ways my labor was much like an out of body experience. I didn’t want this intimate moment of my life, delivering my first child, to be done in front of a bunch of strangers.

After the many hours of being managed and then stared at for forty minutes of pushing, a nurse put my daughter on my chest, and I felt disconnected.

I thought I was supposed to sob and feel rapture, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything. Why did women on social media seem to always do that? What was wrong with me? Later, I looked over and saw my baby on the warmer waving her arm towards the lights. The room had emptied, the unit had suddenly gotten busy, and staff had moved on. My husband was asleep on the couch and my legs were still numb from the epidural. I ached to hold my baby, I was ready now. But I couldn’t reach her.

This is the REPRO MYTH series. New chapters are published Thursdays.

If this resonated, you can Subscribe to follow the full book as it's shared

Next: Chapter 1, Part 2

I’m publishing it here in parts, the way it was written to be experienced:
not as a single argument, but as a thoughtful unraveling.

Each section builds on the last, moving through history, medicine, and personal experience to ask a simple but important question:

What if much of what we’ve been told about our bodies…isn’t actually true?

Introduction

As a women’s health nurse practitioner and professor, I began to see the pattern everywhere. In the brief moments of each rushed clinic appointment, when I would peer into the faces of the women I took care of – excited, anxious, exhausted, resolute. Their stories were always different, yet the underlying connection remained the same: fear, uncertainty, and distrust about their bodies. I recognized every concern, every hand-wring, and frown. I’d been in that position myself.

I heard stories, like my patient Jasmine* who had painstakingly searched for an obstetrician in her first pregnancy. Someone she could trust, who would honor her culture and birth wishes. She found her person. But then her OB went out on leave, so Jas was transferred to a young male doctor who thought he knew best. Her worst fears came true. Jas ended up with a traumatic c-section at 37 weeks and a prolonged hospital stay. I wish I could say this is the exception, but in the U.S. for too many women, it’s the norm.

It was these collective stories, and my own birth experiences, that weighed heavily on my mind. There was a chronic gnawing in my subconscious and that I carried in my spirit. A sense of disconnect that something just wasn’t adding up.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I used medical hypnosis to manage discomfort during my home birth. It was effective and very powerful. The training teaches that our subconscious is always listening and absorbing the messages around us. That struck me as true: since I was very young, my subconscious had absorbed a lifetime of messages. Generally, negative messages about birth, labor, bodies, and womanhood. Before even being pregnant, I had already internalized birth as something dramatic, emergent, managed, and probably deadly.

In the end, it wasn’t my training, clinical experiences, books, or even my first two births that snapped me into reality. They had helped set the foundation, but it was an HBO show that tipped the scales.

It was on a random, blistery, January night, that I watched an Indigenous woman give birth in a pool surrounded by her sisterhood. There were no monitors, and there was no fear, or shame, just a circle of trust. The scene was eerily haunting in its rawness, as if there was something ancient and familiar there. And that’s when my stomach dropped, and something electric moved within me. Wait…isn’t this how we used to give birth? Surrounded by women, trust, and belonging?

And then all those simmering questions in the back of my mind burst forth:

• Why is it the expectation that women in the U.S. go to the hospital to give birth?

• If birth is so dangerous, how did women throughout history survive childbirth without machines and surveillance?

• How did we become so separated from our births, our bodies, and our sisterhood of knowing?

It is with those questions that I began writing this book, but over time it morphed into something deeper, and more powerful. I began to understand the deliberate separation of women from their bodies, from intuition, our communities and ancestral knowledge. It grew into an unlearning of the fear that we have inherited and absorbed.

I discovered our collective truths that were buried in the mythology of reproduction.

The education and degrees didn’t break me out of the system because I was still bound inside of it. I had to do the work of processing my births, while actively listening to and empathizing with the women around me to understand. I needed to do the labor of pulling back layers of history to find the clues about our lost, fearsome, tireless power. That stunning picture of women gathering in circles, hands steady, voices low and humming, trusting birth as sacred and life-giving, not pathological.

Perhaps you’ve had your births and you’re seeking to process them. Or you are looking to learn about your options as you consider future pregnancies. Maybe you want to impart wisdom on to your daughters and sons, your community, or your own sisterhood.

I wrote this book because I once read that if the book you want doesn’t exist, then you need to go write it.

If you’ve ever had even a passing thought about how birth came to be, and how to reclaim it, then this book is for you.

For generations we’ve been told that our bodies can’t be trusted, birth is dangerous, only hospitals are safe, and that midwives are obsolete. But none of that is true. This book has been part of my healing journey, and the research gave me the confidence to have a third birth at home with a midwife. The ancestral connection allowed me to experience birth as spiritual, empowering, and grounded. It was a birth where I didn’t just have full control of my body, I experienced a healing of my spirit.

Only after I processed the loss of myself in my first two deliveries did I rediscover something older, ancestral, and spiritual. And in truth, many people today are feeling that same spiritual magnetism. We are becoming less religious, yet the foundational need for something that feeds the spirit remains vital. People can unbundle traditions and remix them with sacred rituals that build community and create meaning.

Humans need rituals and practices to stimulate the senses. These practices can move a person into a spiritual place beyond the human ego. We can find spirit in our physical health care, and when we do, we must embrace it fully.

Ancient health beliefs centered human dignity and natural balance. This is reflected in the Hippocratic texts, which are the bedrock of modern medicine. The core of medical care was holistic, to unlock health and wellness. We have strayed so far from that harmony between science and spirit.

The missing link has always been a balance of logic and love.

This is the foundation of respectful, affirming care across the reproductive lifespan. Surgical and medical innovation can save lives, but finding ways to honor agency and customs could save many more.

REPRO MYTH is an invitation to trace the threads of myth and modern medicine. To reclaim birth and connect with our lost knowledge. As a nurse and a provider, I couldn’t shake the discomfort I felt while working in the hospital and busy women’s health clinics. I thought I was burning out from the long days and non-stop demands. I didn’t understand how I would collapse at home every night, not just physically tired, but completely drained of spirit.

Then, through research and reflection I discovered why. I found answers through history, the voices of women, and connection with the natural world.*( Footnote: the triad of literature, sister, nature which is reflected in the triangle, circle, snake on a staff iconography representing this book).

Medicine often seeks to find a problem and apply a one-size-fits-all approach, reducing individuals to protocols. True health care sees the whole person and integrates their community and choices. In this book, we’ll travel back in history to learn about the unseen power of women, and their healing lineage across centuries.

We’ll explore why evidence of woman’s knowledge is lacking, then understand how the province of birth has changed so dramatically over time. We will examine how racism, colonialism, and patriarchy reshaped birth. Then we’ll seek the connection between women and nature and revisit the long history of herbal knowledge and embodied wisdom.

Finally, we will return to the present, to the body, to reproductive care and gynecology, through a person-centered, evidence-based, spiritually grounded lens.

Western medicine has its place, but spirituality has its place too. A profound sense of self and self-love, and a deep understanding of the connection between all living things.

Women especially understand that a connection with the natural world and their loved ones is precisely what makes life meaningful. REPRO MYTH is meant to serve as a field guide of women’s history and knowledge, past and future. We can reclaim agency by understanding our past and owning our care in the present; supported by the wisdom of those who came before us, and those who are yet to come.

As you’ll soon see, I began this journey in a vulnerable position and silent. Now, my feet are firmly planted on the ground, and my voice resonates loud and clear. I understand that birth is not just a medical event, it’s society’s mirror of how we value women, bodies, and the sacred. If we can reclaim birth, we can reclaim ourselves.

Come, walk with me, as we discover our collective history, truth, and sisterhood.

This is the REPRO MYTH series. New installments published Thursdays.

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Next: Chapter 1 - Exactly as Designed - Part 1

*name has been changed

Works Cited:

1. Ter Kuile. C. (2023) The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices. Harper Publishing

2. Iglehart, H. Womanspirit: A Guide to Women’s Wisdom (Harper & Row)

3. Kleisiaris, C. F., Sfakianakis, C., & Papathanasiou, I. V. (2014). Health care practices in ancient Greece: The Hippocratic ideal. Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, 7(6). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263393/