Midwife: Reckoning with a Legacy of Control
What is a midwife? This work is about so much more than cute babies and pregnant ladies (don’t. get me wrong, big perks!). This work is about fertility, about reproductive liberty. This work is about reckoning with history, about restoration and reclamation of dignity, pleasure and power for women on the whole continuum of our lives as they are shaped by our generative capacities.
I recently listened to a lecture from birth rights lawyer Hermine Hayes-Kline that she gave at a conference for home birth midwives who came from all over the states to learn together. Her talk began with a history lesson, from ancient to modern times, of women and the law, which is to say, inevitably, women and religion. I thought I understood our history pretty well, but through her presentation, something new settled into place for me and is helping me to articulate how I hold my role as a community midwife. The following is a weaving of what I heard Hermine say about the history of women in middle ages Europe and the Law and my own reaction to it as a midwife today.
Enter the era of the witch hunts. The hunts cary a mythic flavor in western imagination. But they aren’t mythic or imaginal at all. They were calculated, brutal and utterly effectual. They left whole villages with but one or two women standing. They lasted hundreds of years and spread all over Europe. They followed colonizers to America. Ask a European descendant woman today if she can feel the ripples of the hunts in her modern life and many will tell you, in great detail, that they do.
In the 1300’s in Europe two little ice ages befell European lands and two devastating plagues followed. The people were weakened by the fall out of the ice ages, and the plagues killed half of the population of Europe. The peasant population was devastated. For the Feudal and Ecclesiastical elite that depended on the poor and lower classes for their accumulation of wealth and power, this devastation equaled labor shortage. Their response to this problem was the Malleus Maleficarum, a book of law that was designed to address the problem of population control, that defined the crimes of the witch and enabled the killing of so many.
In our mythic imagination the magic works witches were accused of have to do with black cats, toads, perhaps weather magic or love spells. But these were not the crimes of the witch. The crime of the witch was reproductive choice. The collective culture of women in the middle ages, and surely for many centuries or even millennia before that, held such knowledge of their fertile cycles and herbal medicine that they were largely at choice in the spacing and number of children that they had. At the time of the little ice ages and the plagues that followed, the average woman was having 1-2 children in her lifetime.
The Law in the Malleus Maleficarum centers around sex and reproduction. Basically, it outlaws any sexual act that does not lead to procreation, including homosexuality. It outlaws talking about or providing services that might interfere with an act of sexuality producing offspring. The creators of these laws weren’t in a battle against the devil or evil or sin. They were on a mission to assure their feudal work force. They needed to eliminate the culture of women in order to take control of reproduction out of women’s hands so that they could influence population growth.
Ask me how the people behind these laws imagined that the killing of the majority of the childbearing women of their time would lead to a population boom and I can’t tell you. But what I do know is that to this day the majority of women are ignorant of their fertility cycles and completely at a loss for how to manage and be at choice in their fertility without medical intervention. Right now in America, women are in the position of begging the government and religion “permission” for their reproductive choice via medical abortion.
In the eyes of the oppressor, midwifes are the central deviant when it comes to a woman’s right (or lack of) to bodily autonomy. In the witch hunts they were the first and most obvious targets of violence. On behalf of the wisdom they cary and pass on, midwifes are re-imagined as the vile witch that leads poor ignorant women astray (into agency and choice about when they get pregnant and how they express their sexuality). Hermine shared in her talk her experience representing hundreds of women in court, some of whom are victims of obstetric violence, some of whom are midwives. In the case of the midwife, the attack against her still tends toward this rhetoric. The “little lady” has been led astray and made a deviant choice that led to a poor out come for her or her child and the midwife is to blame. Women can’t be expected to make their own informed choice and stand by it, only the “Man” can do that for us.
Having never been able to eradicate the midwife, who despite the injustice will not abandon her people, the patriarchy has settled on licensing the midwife. Through regulation and surveillance of the midwife’s activity, the powers at be can dictate who she can serve and to what end. What skills, medicines and tools she is allowed to employ, what training she can access and how much money she can make. The midwifes realm has historically extended far beyond the act of giving live birth and has included knowledge of fertility, miscarriage, abortion, implantation prevention as well as menopause. But today, herbal and hands on wisdom having to do with birth control, abortion or miscarriage support is painted as “too dangerous” to touch and fertility awareness as birth control is fringe knowledge. The threat of annihilation for the midwife is always near. Break the rules in a system that ties your hands and silences the autonomy and true informed choice of your clients and risk loosing your profession and your reputation, Risk the humiliation of months or years in court, on house arrest or in prison and the distain of your peers for “proving” the myth of the deviant midwife once again.
Yet midwifery persists because the midwife is as natural and necessary to human society as is the father, the mentor, the chief, the musician, the shaman. In the absence of patriarchal reach, women will turn to other women in menstruation, sexuality, pregnancy loss, pregnancy, birth and childrearing. The need for the midwife never goes away. The medical industrial replacements will never satisfy the need of the woman for her midwife, her aunties, her sisters, her mother and her friends.
Through the acknowledgment of where we are coming from and with a prayer for restoration of humane and beloved treatment of women everywhere, I invoke the Midwife unchained from this legacy of control. She is in direct service to woman on her whole reproductive journey from fertility to miscarriage, sex for pleasure and sex for procreation, birth and breastfeeding, through menopause and the crone years. I invoke Midwife as Remembrancer, piecing together the skills and medicines that cover a woman’s whole reproductive life. She is the Truth Teller, intimate witness to the atrocities of the system we take for granted as “medicine”. She is the Shapeshifter, evading danger by remaining invisible. She is the Warrior, protecting and defending the women she loves from the inhumanity of this deeply imbedded tangle of violence and control. She is a Lover, taking on all of these mantles for one purpose: knowledge of the majesty of woman and her divine role as guardian and keeper of the gates of life.
