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At the end of the text you will find a link to the full recorded class with illustrative images.

There is an image I carry with me from a birth I attended several years ago: the umbilical cord of a newborn baby kept pulsing for fifteen minutes. I remember the astonishment of everyone in the room, the curiosity about how long it would keep beating. It is …

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Over time, I understood that many of those experiences had something in common: no one ever taught me that my consent mattered, and that leaves a mark on how a person learns to exist in the world, how she relates to her body, and what she believes she can ask for, refuse, or change.

I wish I had learned it much earlier. I wish I had grown up knowing that my body belongs to me, that I can say yes, that I can say no, that I can change my mind, and that none of those decisions need justification. Because when you learn that lesson late, you don’t just learn a word—you also learn everything that not having had it before implied.

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We all carry within our bodies the experience of how we were born. and obviously, the experiences we’ve had giving birth. This is what we’re interfacing with when we’re working with anyone in the gestational portal, in postpartum. There is a big collective feeling body here. Some of our experiences overlap. Some are universal, and some will be very distinct and different.

So let’s orient first to what birth trauma actually is, because the word trauma gets used pretty broadly now, and being precise matters — because in that precision lives a pathway toward repair, toward accountability, toward the possibility of healing.

two bodies, two wounds

When we experience trauma, harm, or wounding in birth, there are two distinct pathways.

There is the physical body. lacerations, cuts, the way someone handles us, the limitations placed on our movement, injury, pathology—physical experience that can be damaging, that can be wounding in ways we’re still carrying years later.

And then there is the energetic-emotional-spiritual body. It still moves through the physicality — through the psyche, through the nervous system, through the emotional aspect of us — but it exists in a different register.

These two can happen together, they can also happen independently.

You can have a birth where the physical body is fine, where objectively everything is in health, and the emotional, spiritual, energetic space feels completely fragmented, fractured, wounded. And you can have a birth where the body was very physically impacted — a cesarean, a significant tear, a major episiotomy, lots of interventions — and someone feels energetically, emotionally, at peace, safe.

what the numbers say

In the united states in 2024, 32.4% of all babies were born by cesarean section. One in three mothers had major abdominal surgery to bring their baby earthside. The public health goal for low-risk first-time mothers is to not end up in a cesarean at all, and yet here we are.

On top of that: the variety of inductions — from membrane sweeps to IV Pitocin, episiotomies, vacuum, foley catheters, forceps…interventions that can result in fourth-degree tears that permanently change the landscape of a woman’s body. The IV lines, the fetal monitors, the limitation of not being able to move — and the biomechanical cost of that constraint in a process that requires movement.

This is the physical landscape of institutional birth, a body that is experiencing birth rather than being free to move within the dance of birth. And all of this results in things that move forward: organ prolapse, hormonal dysregulation, structural injuries that need rehabilitation, repair.

But the wound that is now being tracked more — though it still barely shows up statistically — is something else. When you simply ask women how they experienced their birth, about a third express some level of trouble. And that’s not even going into complicated births. The ones who go on to experience or develop a full spectrum of post-traumatic stress — a diagnosable psychological or neurological disorder from birth — are between 4% and 6% of all women birthing, in the united states, that’s approximately 240,000 women every year carrying some kind of PTSD from birth.

That is an insane number, and those are only the ones meeting every clinical criterion and even seeking out care on that level. The circle around that is much larger — women experiencing it in varying degrees, who don’t maybe carry the full symptoms of a full diagnosis, but who are experiencing it, and who may not even have the space or capacity to fully tell the story, because they’re mothering, because their body is in survival mode, because they don’t yet have words for what happened.

This can be flashbacks to moments of trauma from earlier in life, now activated through the birth portal, flashbacks to the birth itself, where an intervention that might seem subtle created a significant imprint in the body. Anxiety, depression, dread, hypervigilance… intrusive thoughts, sometimes a physical inability to fully communicate what happened.

So when we say birth trauma — this is what we mean. The full spectrum of it. From the physical, to how the physical can activate the psycho-emotional and spiritual, to how the psycho-emotional and spiritual can exist entirely on their own, it is an injury to the body, to the soul. and often, it is an injury to the instinct.

who it wounds most

Birth trauma isn’t random, and it is not equal.

Poor people, poor communities experience higher rates of objective physical birth trauma and a higher objective rate of lack of collective and systemic care. And racially: Indigenous, Black, and people from the global south, anyone who has been deemed other, marginalized, less-than through the constructs of our society — they carry this disproportionately.

In the united states, a Black mother is three times more likely to die from pregnancy or birth than a white mother. In 2024, the death rate for Black women was 44.8 per 100,000 births, for white women, it was 14.2.

This is rooted in a racist belief that has been embedded in American medicine since Marion Sims forcibly experimented on enslaved Black women — without sedatives, without pain medication — in developing the field of gynecology and obstetrics. The concept that was established: that Black people have a higher pain threshold, that they need less, that when they name something happening in their body it’s probably not that bad.

And this isn’t only about money or education. a Black woman with a college degree or higher is still more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman who never finished high school. Education is not protecting her, what is killing her is racism — how she is seen, how she is not seen, how she is heard or not heard.

I was getting my nails done recently with my mom, and the young woman doing my nails — twenty-two years old, from Venezuela, a migrant here — told me she had a concussion from her birth, because her doctor punched her in the head, because when she was crowning, her instinct was to bring her knees together, and his response was to punch her in the head. And this is normalized because she is considered of lower status, lower class, and discriminated against ethnically. This is happening. in some places less prevalently, but it is part of the collective experience of birth.

The mothers with the highest death rates in the united states are Native American and Alaskan Native women, and their statistics are often suppressed in official reports because the populations are considered too small to report reliably. The ones physically dying are often the ones we have the least data on.

Dying is the sharpest edge of it, but underneath death is a whole ocean of mistreatment that nobody is dying from, but that is now being carried in the body.

The Giving Voice to Mothers study found that 1 in 6 women in the united states report being mistreated during birth care — shouted at, scolded, ignored when asking for help, having their bodies handled without consent, threatened with treatments they didn’t want, threatened with CPS for saying no to certain protocols— across women at the same economic level: women of color report mistreatment at 27%, white women at 18%. same income. different color. different treatment.

This is why culturally coherent birth care matters so deeply. and culturally coherent doesn’t only mean someone who looks like you — though there is an element of that. It means someone who truly understands embodied and lived experience, who has checked their own internal biases and done the inner work. who is here for life, not just performing care.

home birth isn’t exempt

after everything i just named, it would be easy to say: hospital bad, home good. if we could just get every mother out of the institutional system, the trauma ends. but that’s not the full truth.

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Felkin documented everything. The woman was sedated with fermented banana wine, which worked as anesthesia. That same wine was used to wash the surgeon’s hands and the woman’s abdomen, meaning alcohol was being used as an antiseptic at a time when many European surgeons were still resisting Lister’s ideas about antisepsis. Bleeding was controlled with a red-hot iron to cauterize the edges of the incision, and with sustained uterine massage, what we would now recognize as active management of postpartum hemorrhage. Then he closed the abdominal wall with polished iron pins and applied a paste made from roots over the wound, which likely worked as a hemostatic and probably antibacterial dressing. Felkin stayed with the mother and baby for eleven days. No signs of systemic infection. And in his conclusion he wrote something that feels essential to me: that the precision of the technique could only be explained by the fact that they had been doing it for a long time.

And yet the history of cesarean birth has been told to us as an exclusively Western story. As if knowledge from other peoples, from Africa, from Asia, had never existed. As if the human body, faced with difficult births, with mothers dying, with babies that needed rescuing, had only ever produced ingenious responses in Europe.

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(this is a very brief transcript from the LIVE class, so be sure to tune into it for the full transmission)

Opening Meditation and Reflection

Before we begin, I want to invite you to just close your eyes for a moment, connect with your body, and feel into this question: What has been the most consciousness-expanding experience of your life?

Where were you? How did you get there? What did you remember or learn in that experience? How did it change you?

I invite you to comment and connect with us about what that is. It is definitely something we will be drawing upon as we talk about brainwaves and states of consciousness.

Why Brainwaves Matter in Birth

The first thing we need is a map—an orientation to what this is and why it matters in birth. It is certainly neuroscience; it’s something happening neurologically within the physical structure of our nervous system and brain. However, it is also what creates the “flavor” of an experience. It is a vital natural mechanism of the body’s intelligence, designed to guide us through the gestational and birth portal.

Understanding Brainwave States

Beta (14–30 Hz)

The first brainwave is Beta. This is when our state of mind is alert, analytical, and focused on problem-solving. It is the everyday waking aspect of our mind, and it’s what allows us to function right now. I am in Beta; I am referencing my notes as I share this with you. I am in a productive, constructive, operational state.

Within Beta, there are tiers. There is the sense of being in Beta in a hyper-stressed type of production, and then there is Beta at a flowing, collaborative level of productivity. It’s how our world runs—how we engineer roads and drive on them. It is how institutions of higher learning function.

Crucially, it is also what dominates in modern hospital birth: bright lights, questions, and monitoring through technology. We can say that the act of choosing, deciding, speaking, and informed consent exists in this Beta space. But relative to pregnancy and birth, it is an exhausting place if held too long, because it pulls a mother out of her body and into her head.

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Some women describe labor as a journey. Not metaphorically — as a lived experience that transcends time, space, and rational awareness. Sometimes it comes as visions. Sometimes as wordless certainties. Sometimes simply as the feeling that ten minutes lasted an hour, or that an hour vanished in a blink. Midwives who work in physiological birth call this the birth land, planeta parto.

This experience isn’t mystical in any esoteric sense — though it can be that too. It is, first and foremost, neurochemistry. It is what happens when the brain of a human mammal — and her baby’s brain — is flooded with the most potent hormones the body produces. And understanding it changes everything.

“Birth isn’t only about pain. There is laughter, tears of joy, ecstasy. That part almost never gets documented.”

The shy hormone that moves everything

Oxytocin: Oxytocin is the star of labor — but also of the hug, of falling in love, of orgasm, and of forgiveness. It is a neurotransmitter that orients us toward bonding. It flows when we feel safe. Which is why it is shy: if there is fear, if there is threat, if stress adrenaline enters the picture, oxytocin retreats.

During labor, every contraction is preceded by a pulse of oxytocin released from the brain into the bloodstream. This is the highest oxytocin peak a person will ever experience in their lifetime. And that same hormone that drives contractions also contracts the uterus after birth to seal open blood vessels, stimulates the milk ducts to release milk, and — crucially — places mother and baby in an expanded state of consciousness specifically designed for falling in love.

Newborns arrive with high oxytocin levels too. That is why immediate skin-to-skin contact isn’t a preference or a cultural nicety — it is the biological window in which two nervous systems meet each other fully prepared to make the love-imprint that will sustain the bond for the rest of their lives.

The anesthesia nature gave us

Beta-endorphins: Beta-endorphins are natural opioids — the body’s own pain modulators. They are what makes labor custom-fitted to each woman: no birth is larger than the person living it, because the body calibrates its own anesthesia.

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Before I ever entered the portal of pregnancy, I had done considerable work with death. I had lost loved ones. I had experienced losses within my own body — events that required me to be rebirthed into a new version of myself. I had sat with plant medicines that took me to the edges of form and brought me back. All of this had led me to a place of genuine peace with impermanence. Death as the cessation of form. Death as irreparable transformation. I had made a kind of sacred accommodation with it, and it felt, honestly, liberating.

So I was humbled — profoundly, almost comically humbled — when my third trimester arrived and brought with it a visceral, primal fear of death. Of my death. Of my baby’s death.

The mind went where minds go: If I die, who raises my baby? Do I need to write a will? What if something goes wrong and I’m judged for the choices I made? What if I chose the wrong path and my community turns away from me? I had spent years metabolizing the fear of death conceptually, energetically, in ceremony — and here it was, fully present, rising up in the middle of a fluorescent Walmart while I was buying mason jars to prepare tinctures before birth. Later I came to understand that a shooting had actually occurred at that Walmart. In pregnancy, we become extraordinarily porous. We take in the collective field. That is the evolutionary design — the pregnant body processes the world, moving its frequency through flesh so that something is transmuted, transformed.

But in that moment, all I knew was: I have dissolved so many of my fears, and here they all are.

Fear Is Ancient. It Is Protective. It Is Not Pathological.

This is the first and most important thing to understand, whether you are someone moving through pregnancy or a practitioner walking alongside those who are: fear in pregnancy and birth is ancient, protective, and biologically intelligent. It is not something that signals that something is wrong with you.

The physiologist Grantley Dick-Reed described what he called the fear-tension-pain cycle. When fear arrives — in whatever form, at whatever intensity — the body tenses. A holding pattern emerges. Sometimes it’s overt: clenched fists, a tight jaw, shoulders drawn up toward the ears. Sometimes it’s subtler, happening at the level of fascia. But constriction follows fear, and constriction amplifies sensation. In pregnancy and labor especially, this cycle matters enormously, because the body’s capacity to open, flow, and move relies on the opposite of constriction — it relies on spaciousness.

This is why fear, when it goes unacknowledged, unwitnessed, unnamed, tends to accumulate. The mind is insatiable. Thought forms loop. The body picks up the frequency and tenses further. And then, depending on our emotional capacity in a given moment, that fear can spill outward — into our relationships, into our environment, into the people we love.

The path through is always the same: acknowledgment, witnessing, engagement. Fear does not dissolve through suppression. It moves through the body by being named.

The Architecture of Fear in Pregnancy

Fear does not arrive as one unified experience. It arrives in layers, and it is worth understanding the different forms it takes.

The fear of death — of the baby’s death, of one’s own death — is among the most ancient. Even for those who have done extensive inner work around mortality, this fear can arrive with startling physicality in pregnancy. This is its function. It is the body asking the most fundamental questions of the passage.

The fear of abandonment and relational fracture runs beneath so much of what presents in prenatal work.

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Los primeros treinta años de mi vida, yo fui el sol. Todo orbitaba alrededor mío: mis decisiones, mis prioridades, mis deseos, mi tiempo. Y en el momento en que empecé a gestar, algo comenzó a moverse. Progresivamente fui trasladándome hacia la órbita de mi propio sistema solar, y…

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Hola, hermosa comunidad — estamos en este hermoso estudio exploratorio comprometidas juntas a ustedes. En esta publicación estamos recapitulando todas las clases hasta ahora. Encontrarán abajo los enlaces a todas las clases EN VIVO.

I (Aya Maria) am also here to share a bit about what has come through as we nurture the Elemental Birth School and the greater vision it proposes.

Yo (Aya Maria) también estoy aquí para compartir un poco de lo que ha ido emergiendo mientras nutrimos la Elemental Birth School y la visión más amplia que propone

1. Visioning — dreaming — is easy. The challenge is nurturing, daily, weekly, rhythmically, that which we want to see grow. Because life. And because for Amapola and me, we are doing life right now: raising toddlers, working full time, attending births, and teaching through other birth education avenues. At first we thought we would be able to immediately transition to giving this space our full energy and attention, but we were reminded that seeds take time to germinate. So we hold the vision and the dream, and trust that the timing to unfold the totality of this space will come exactly when it’s meant. It’s bittersweet.

   Visualizar — soñar — es fácil. El desafío es nutrir, día a día, semana a semana, de manera rítmica, aquello que queremos ver crecer. Porque así es la vida. Y porque para Amapola y para mí, estamos viviendo la vida en este momento: criando niños pequeños, trabajando tiempo completo, acompañando partos y enseñando a través de otros espacios de educación en nacimiento. Al principio pensamos que podríamos hacer una transición inmediata para darle a este espacio toda nuestra energía y atención, pero se nos recordó que las semillas toman tiempo en germinar. Así que sostenemos la visión y el sueño, y confiamos en que el momento para que la totalidad de este espacio se despliegue llegará exactamente cuando tenga que llegar. Es agridulce.

2. When you’re about to create something great, things will emerge to challenge you, derail you… make things hard. We have each been dealing with our own unforeseen events of challenge, some extracting and requiring more energy than others. Through that, we remain steady in the importance of this study studio — in service to all who can receive, benefit, and grow. As well as for ourselves, to review, refine, and remember.

   Cuando estás a punto de crear algo grande, siempre aparecen cosas que te desafían, que intentan desviarte… que hacen las cosas difíciles. Cada una de nosotras ha estado atravesando eventos inesperados de desafío, algunos que han requerido y extraído más energía que otros. A través de todo eso, nos mantenemos firmes en la importancia de este estudio de aprendizaje — al servicio de todas las personas que puedan recibir, beneficiarse y crecer. Y también para nosotras mismas: para revisar, refinar y recordar.

3. This (the challenge) requires tending to our ceremony. For Amapola, much of it returns to the inipi, to that hearth. For me, I root into my altar and the quiet connection of being immersed in the woods — places we can go to bare it all raw and be reoriented to our greater purpose.

   Esto (el desafío) requiere atender nuestra ceremonia. Para Amapola, mucho de eso regresa al inipi, a ese fuego, a ese hogar ceremonial. Para mí, vuelvo a enraizarme en mi altar y en la conexión silenciosa de estar inmersa en el bosque — lugares a los que podemos ir para mostrarnos tal cual somos, en lo crudo, y reorientarnos hacia nuestro propósito mayor.

4. If we want new pathways in birthcare, both in receiving and giving, we have to show up. Part of the genesis of the Elemental Birth School was many, many people saying they wanted something different than the existing models of doula and midwifery schooling. And in the same way that creating that is a whole journey, it is also a huge leap to choose something different — to give strength and life to a new pathway.

   Si queremos nuevos caminos en el cuidado del nacimiento, tanto en recibirlo como en ofrecerlo, tenemos que hacernos presentes. Parte de la génesis de la Elemental Birth School fue que muchísimas personas decían querer algo diferente a los modelos existentes de formación en doula y partería. Y de la misma manera que crear algo así es todo un camino, también es un gran salto elegir algo distinto — darle fuerza y vida a un nuevo camino.

So thank you for being here for this genesis. May it continue to bridge, inspire, awaken, and open possibilities for you and your communities.

Our Next live class will be March 25, I’ll be teaching on Supporting Fear & Uncertainty During Pregnancy

Below are all of our classes so far.

Así que gracias por estar aquí en esta génesis. Que continúe tendiendo puentes, inspirando, despertando y abriendo posibilidades para ustedes y para sus comunidades.

Nuestra próxima clase en vivo será el 25 de marzo, donde estaré enseñando sobre Cómo acompañar el miedo y la incertidumbre durante el embarazo.

Abajo encontrarán todas las clases que hemos tenido hasta ahora.

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For a long time, the story told about the maternal brain was a story of loss. The first studies showed a reduction in gray matter density during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and the headlines followed: motherhood shrinks your brain. The “mommy brain” — that fog, that forgetting, the sense of not being able to hold a thought — seemed confirmed by science. Many of us internalized it. Many of us used it against ourselves.

The first findings were misread

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This conversation about preconception nutrition and wisdom for being fertile is not only for those who are thinking about “making a baby and a placenta.” It is a conversation about how we nourish our fertility throughout life, knowing that the same energy that allows us to conceive a baby is the one that sustains our seeds, our dreams, our ideas, and the creativity we want in our lives.

Fertility is not an isolated event nor an exclusively reproductive issue. It is an expression of our vitality, our health, and our longevity, and that is why this information applies to all people, whether or not they want a motherhood or fatherhood project.

This piece is educational and does not replace medical, clinical, or therapeutic care.

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As this class approached, I found myself reflecting deeply on what was most important to share. Of course, the science—the anatomy and physiology—is vital. But the truth is, the internet is full of rich information, and most obstetric and midwifery textbooks will teach you about oogenesis, spermatogenesis, and embryology. What we offer here, beyond the biological theory (which we will still transmit), is the recognition of how important it is to orient ourselves toward something that truly satiates our way of knowing and can then translate into a shift in perspective—a reconfiguration that opens pathways in our lives. This is in service not only to better and more aligned perinatal care, but also to a new way of living, a new culture. We can see our origins as a blueprint for how we might collaborate and create the ideal conditions for life to thrive.

So in this class we covered:

✔️ Oogenesis & Spermatogenesis: The distinct biological processes of egg and sperm development—finite versus renewable production and what that means for fertility

✔️ Challenging the “race” metaphor: Tracing the cultural origins of the competitive sperm narrative and why it doesn’t reflect biological reality

✔️ A collaborative view of fertilization: How Indigenous cosmologies offer a more accurate framework for understanding conception as a cooperative process

✔️ Elemental truths in reproduction: Connecting biological processes to larger cultural themes of resource management, collaboration, and cyclical renewal

✔️ Supporting the body’s wisdom: Why understanding these processes matters for fertility care, gestation support, and postpartum healing

✔️ Cultural narratives and biological truth: How the stories we tell about conception reflect—and reinforce—broader societal values about competition, scarcity, and collaboration

✔️ Reclaiming reproductive knowledge: The need for a cultural shift in how we view, honor, and support these natural processes

✨ Full access to the replay, bilingual transcript, forum discussion, and future classes is available inside the Elemental Birth School membership.

Welcome to Seed of Life, our class on Oogenesis and Spermatogenesis as part of the Elemental Birth School Study Studio. Today, we are going to dive into reclaiming our origin story—our physiologic origin story—and getting into the anatomy and physiology, the territory and the dynamics of these origins, these seeds that we come from.

And before we get into all of it, I want to invite us to ground in. You can bring your eyes to a close, or you can just look away from the screen. And just feel your body in this moment. Feel your breath in this moment. And invite yourself to arrive in receptivity to what is going to be shared today.

And relax the body, starting from the jaw, the shoulders, the spine, the hips, the knees, the toes.

And as you’re connected with your breath, I invite you to travel to what you feel is your point of origin. Where is your beginning? And just see what comes up. A place, a color, a sensation, a visualization, a sound. Your place of origin. And you can write that down or just hold it with you. And whenever you feel ready, you can come into the shared space. So we’re getting into the space of orienting to how we come to be.

Because that is one thing that universally unites us as humans: we originate from these seeds into fetuses, into infants, into children, into teenagers, into adults, and so forth.

The Conquest Narrative: What We Were Taught

Most of us were taught, either implicitly or explicitly, a story about our origins that sounds like a conquest—a race, a winner, penetration, triumph. Many of us learned this through our biology classes and often through movies and popular culture. Perhaps you recall a vivid scene from a film depicting sperm racing and competing with other sperm to penetrate the egg.

We are told that millions of sperm compete, and one wins. We are told that the egg waits passively, waiting to be penetrated, conquered, and won over. In this way, the narrative frames fertilization as an invasion story—who breaks through first, who wins.

And so what we're here to do is reframe, recontextualize, and reclaim this narrative. Because the idea that fertilization is a story of conquest and competition is not a biological truth—it's a cultural metaphor that was superimposed onto early microscopic observation. When sperm were first visualized under a microscope, the cultural lens through which scientists interpreted their behavior was one of competition and conquest. So let's dive into the truth.

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No es romántico. Incluye trauma, incluye violencia estructural, incluye siglos de extracción sin reparación. Pero ahí está: el útero que sabe cómo contraerse, el sistema nervioso que registra seguridad o peligro, la respiración que se ajusta al umbral. El cuerpo tiene memoria.

¿Pero qué hacemos con un cuerpo que sabe una cosa... y un sistema que insiste en decirle otra?

El cuerpo sabe

Déjame definir esto primero, porque no estoy hablando de algo abstracto ni místico.

Hablo del conocimiento fisiológico: el útero que se contrae en oleadas, el cuello uterino que se abre cuando las condiciones son seguras, el sistema nervioso parasimpático que permite la dilatación, la oxitocina que fluye cuando no hay adrenalina bloqueándola. Hablo de esa pausa fisiológica que ocurre entre las contracciones—el cuerpo descansando, reorganizándose—y que en un hospital se traduce como “falta de progreso”.

Este conocimiento corporal no se origina en libros de texto. Se transmitía de cuerpo a cuerpo: de madres, abuelas, tías, mujeres que habían nacido alrededor del parto y dado a luz ellas mismas. Antes de que existiera la palabra “partera” como un rol externo que subcontratas, simplemente estaba integrado en la vida. Damos a luz y nacemos, entonces por supuesto sabemos cómo cuidarlo.

Y sí, lo he sentido en mi experiencia y en mi cuerpo. He visto cuerpos que saben cuándo empujar, cuándo descansar, cuándo necesitan silencio o movimiento o contacto. He visto bebés que saben cómo rotar en el canal de parto sin que nadie les “enseñe” biomecánica.

Pero también sé—y esto es crucial nombrarlo—que ese conocimiento no existe aislado de las condiciones materiales que lo sostienen o lo fragmentan. Porque nacer requiere seguridad. Requiere nutrición. Requiere tierra, agua, alimento, tiempo, redes colectivas de cuidado. Requiere un sistema nervioso que no esté constantemente en modo de supervivencia.

¿Verdad?

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To understand birth, we must understand power. Right? The way humans give birth has always mirrored how human labor itself is valued, organized, extracted, and controlled within the society we're living in. Birth is not only biological and physiologic—it's also economic. It's political. It's material. It's spiritual. How life is gestated, how we choose to give birth or are able to give birth, how we are held afterward—none of this is neutral. It has always been socially organized. And sometimes that social organization means it's protected. Sometimes it means it's exploited. Sometimes it's something that is being deliberately interfered with, all in service to the dominant order of the time.

Midwifery in what is now called the United States is often told as a story of loss and revival—something that was suppressed, wisdom we've forgotten, and now we're rediscovering. I feel this to be true in my experience and in my body. But I also feel that this framing is comforting, and it misses something essential. Midwifery wasn't lost. It was deliberately created within specific social systems, and then it was dismantled when it no longer served those systems. What we're witnessing now is not a return. It's a selective reconstruction under the dominant culture's terms—and that dominant culture, for some time now, has been capitalism.

Reproductive Labor Is Material

Let me define this first. Midwifery is not just an identity, not just a calling or a lifestyle. It is those things, but it's also reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is the work we do to sustain life across generations. It's the labor that goes into sustaining a pregnancy, guarding and caring for a birth, supporting postpartum family integration, child-rearing, illness care, and developmental milestones within that perinatal threshold. Right? This labor has always been material—as in, it requires matter. It requires land. Where is birth happening, and who owns that land? It requires food, water, time, embodied knowledge, and social structures that distribute responsibility for carrying these processes beyond the individual.

And it has always been carried out primarily by women—mothers, grandmothers, aunties, elders embedded and invested in the well-being of their communities. But under capitalism, reproductive labor, like domestic labor, becomes systematically devalued. It becomes rendered invisible. It's something that is sustaining all of life, but we don't see it, we don't give it value, and it's actually extracted without reciprocity or repair. Right? And anyone here who is a caretaker of life in any capacity knows this—an unmeasurable amount of time, energy, effort, and presence, constantly being on. It's truly invaluable. But in this system, it's actually rendered invisible but expected.

Midwifery exists within this logic, and it is affected by the same logics that are governing housing, food systems, and labor markets. We don't birth outside of those realities.

Before Colonization: Birth as Collective Infrastructure

Before European contact, prior to 1492 on Turtle Island, there were many Indigenous societies and communities that all had reproductive systems that were not separate from the rest of their lives. They had their individual and diverse beliefs and rituals, but birth was not a private event managed by a specialist. It was not considered something medicalized, pathological, or risky. It was a social process held within the communal network, held within the seasonal rhythms, held within land-based foodways—what's in harvest, what's in season—held within spiritual cosmologies that allowed the recognition that reproduction is tied directly to responsibility to each other and to the land.

There was no division between health and culture and economy and spirituality. It's all interconnected and reciprocal. The same system that ensured soil health, seed saving, and hunting practices also ensured that communal care existed for safe passage of life entering into the world. And if there were midwives—maybe that word exists, maybe it doesn't—in a lot of First Nations and Indigenous languages, the word for midwife is not separate from the word for mother or for woman. In this way, we can see it's completely embedded. They're accountable to their community because they birthed their community. And if they have a sense of authority or leadership, it's not coming from external validation or licensing, but from the recognition of their community, from lineage and trust and lived participation.

This is what existed in Indigenous Europe, too, before the conquests and the witch hunts.

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Gracias a quienes pudieron asistir a nuestra primera clase EN VIVO del Study Studio de Elemental Birth School.
A continuación encontrarán la grabación de la clase, con subtítulos traducidos, así como la transcripción completa, escrita tanto en inglés como en español.

✧ What we covered in class

✔️ A historical and anthropological foundation of midwifery and women’s medicine
✔️ The myth of scientific superiority and how it was constructed
✔️ The relationship between capitalism, reproduction, and population control
✔️ An in-depth look at witch hunts as political strategy
✔️ How colonialism and patriarchy shaped birth practices globally
✔️ The origins of obstetric violence and the mechanization of birth
✔️ Why intuition, embodiment, and ancestral knowledge still matter today
✔️ Context for decolonizing birth, medicine, and knowledge systems

✨ Full access to the replay, bilingual transcript, forum discussion, and future classes is available inside the Elemental Birth School membership.

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✧ Opening & Context

Hello everyone. We’re going to be together in this class on the history and anthropology of midwifery. My name is Amapola Pacheco. I am an anthropologist and a midwife, and I have been accompanying home births for thirteen years. Together with Aya María, I am part of Elemental Birth School within this membership of the Study Studio, and today we are exploring a class that seeks to give context to much of the theoretical content we will be sharing.

Knowing our history—our history as women of knowledge, as carriers of feminine epistemologies and pathways of knowing the feminine—as well as the history of intuitive technologies in the West over the last centuries, will help us build a theoretical and historical framework to understand why we are experiencing birth, and our ways of knowing, the way we are living them today.

I want to state a clear intention for this class from the beginning. In many parts of the world, it is commonly believed that midwifery was replaced by obstetrics, and that women’s medicine was replaced by hegemonic Western medicine, due to a supposed greater technical competence. This is very far from reality. The idea of a technical superiority of male medicine and science is, in fact, a historical myth. A long historical transition was required for science to establish itself as the hegemonic and dominant epistemology, because in its origins, it was not. Women’s medicine, their ways of healing and knowing, were (are) in many ways, more apt and more effective.

✧ Women, Medicine, and the Pre-Capitalist World

For example, in the Middle Ages—roughly speaking, from the fifteenth century backward—due to a series of political, economic, and social movements, women were stripped of the dominance we held within medicine. We were replaced by what we now call European male science, which today is hegemonic. Not only was our place within communities as wise women, physicians, and midwives taken from us, but our knowledge was also expropriated: it was taken as the foundation for the development of this new European science. At the same time, we were pushed into a position where our knowledge began to be labeled as superstition, witchcraft, or invalid knowledge.

In addition to this, we were prevented from continuing to study: the doors of universities and medical schools were closed to us. This has been a systematic movement sustained for more than six centuries.

That is why the first thing I want to point out is that the supposed technical superiority attributed today to science and medicine as we know them is the result of political, social, and economic processes that began in the fifteenth century. Before that moment, and prior to it, women were the physicians within communities and villages; we midwives were also responsible for pharmacology, for knowledge of plants, and for a deeply empirical form of medicine.

✧ Empirical Knowledge & Intuitive Technologies

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Breaking this pattern is the first p…

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