Traditional Midwifery Project
Something essential has been lost in today’s climate of midwifery.
We aim to preserve and elevate all of the hard earned wisdom and knowledge of traditional midwives and share it with the world!
For eons, women and their midwives have preserved the knowing of our bodies through storytelling and oral traditions. Using today’s technologies we want to uphold your legacies and broadcast your stories to a wider audience, thereby hopefully changing the course of a modern midwifery that is looking more medical by the day.
What We Noticed
It is our experience that something essential has been lost, or is threatened, in today’s climate of midwives. More and more we see that the trusting spirit you and your colleagues brought to the pregnancies and births of the women you served, is absent – replaced by a focus on external testing, a reliance on ultrasounds, a language mirroring the hospitals we hope to avoid, and a general anxiety about a woman’s body’s ability to successfully and safely birth her baby.
You are the group of midwives who had to seek out kind doctors who would train you in the skills necessary to keep a woman safely at home. From that skill set, it was up to your generation to reclaim and craft a body of unique knowledge of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. When it came time to join your ranks, each of us has benefitted from your books, teachings, or presence, and were blessed to resume the age old tradition of apprenticeship under another midwife, rather than a doctor. Your pioneering spirits have long kept us inspired and constant throughout many long nights at the feet of women!
As founders of this program we have referred to ourselves as ‘bridge midwives’, midwives who can hopefully bridge the generation of midwives that have come before, and those that are now coming after.
It is our experience that something essential has been lost, or is threatened, in today’s climate of midwives. More and more we see that the trusting spirit you and your colleagues brought to the pregnancies and births of the women you served, is absent – replaced by a focus on external testing, a reliance on ultrasounds, a language mirroring the hospitals we hope to avoid, and a general anxiety about a woman’s body’s ability to successfully and safely birth her baby.
Our Vision
Our vision is to model how midwives have always talked to women, in person (perhaps over a cup of tea) and in conversation where we pick your brain and discuss all things birth. These meetings will be recorded by a professional videographer and/or recorded in a podcast form, and then congregated in a website. For your time and longstanding commitment to a calling we have also dedicated our lives to, we would like to compensate you for your time and service.
Please let us honor you by joining us in our project to preserve midwifery and midwives where they should be stored – in the spiritual hearts and physical bodies of women.