I’ve been travelling and mostly unplugged these past weeks, but I keep dipping back into the True Midwifery online community to feel its pulse. And every time, I’m reminded how rare it is to find a space that runs on love, trust, and discernment.

It’s not that we all agree. Far from it. We come from different trainings, traditions, and ways of working. But there’s a deep respect for one another’s paths — and in the birth world, that’s something precious.

Lately, our upcoming Study Spiral has stirred up some big feelings for me around the topic of modern-day witch hunts. And I keep coming back to this: so often, they are about women not trusting each other. Turning on each other to feel safe, or to keep our footing in a system that doesn’t truly support us.

In birth work, it’s the same old pattern — patriarchy’s favourite trick: divide and rule.

The Splintering of Our Roles

One way this shows up is in the way we’ve created countless “safe” titles so we can be allowed to serve mothers and babies. Birthkeeper. Doula. Traditional Birth Attendant.

Once, all of these roles were simply what it meant to be a midwife — a person who stood beside the mother and baby through the threshold of birth. Now, we’ve been split and split and split again. With every division, we’re more restricted, more regulated, more over-specialised… and less able to offer the full, holistic care mothers and babies actually need.

A Lesson from the Anamaboya

I was reminded of this when I sat with the Anamaboya — the traditional Shona midwives in Zimbabwe. I shared with them the different titles we see nowadays, and they looked at me with quiet confusion, as if I’d just asked for a different word for love, or for water.

“What do you call yourselves?” I asked.

“Anamaboya,” they said simply. Midwife. Grandmother.

Their qualification? Being called to the work by God. A dream.
Their gift? Deep humility. Trust in birth. A willingness to learn. The knowledge that their true work is to love the mother.

Who Decides?

Not long ago, an empirical midwife I met offered me a definition I’ve been holding close:

A midwife is a midwife when recognised as such by her community.

It’s such a simple sentence, and yet it pulls at so many threads — identity, authority, recognition, belonging.

For me, this is not about deciding on one definition. It’s about opening the conversation and letting the questions breathe:

Who gets to decide what a midwife is?How does language include… and exclude?And how might our own divisions be keeping us from serving mothers and babies as fully as we could?

I’d love to explore these questions together in our upcoming Study Spiral.

With love,
Ruth

Join this month’s Spiral → true-midwifery1.teachable.com/p/true-midwifery-study-spirals

Last Spot in the Birth First Aid Course (starting 2 Sept) → true-midwifery1.teachable.com/p/birth-first-aid

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