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Women have been helping each other give birth since the beginning of time. Until several hundred years ago, there were no doctors or hospitals, and women passed their birthing knowledge on to each other. Some women became very good at helping others give birth, and they earned a lot of respect for their knowledge and ability. They were called midwives, which means “with woman.”

Giving birth is very risky, for both mothers and their babies. Some births don’t go well and serious problems or even death occur during labor. Long ago, birth, death, and healing were even greater mysteries than they are today. That put midwives in a precarious position. If a midwife was there when a baby died, she might have been blamed for causing the baby’s death.

Why would anyone want to believe such a horrible thing about midwives?

One reason is that people get frustrated when they can’t find answers to life’s biggest tragedies. Myths and superstitions often spring up to explain the unexplainable. Sometimes, innocent people find themselves on the wrong side of a superstition.

For example, lots of bad things happened in Europe from the 1300s to the 1800s—great floods, terrible sicknesses, crop failures, and infant deaths. Midwives became a target for people trying to explain why so many babies and mothers died. One superstition that took hold was that midwives, with their knowledge of herbs and oils for making mothers comfortable, were witches who got their knowledge from the devil.

The worst time for midwives in Europe was between 1550 and 1650. That’s when witch hunts reached their peak. There was so much fear about witches (or being accused of witchcraft) that sometimes it was safer to believe the stories. People who spoke up in defense of accused witches ran the risk of being accused themselves! The Catholic Church even said that devout people had to believe in witches. People accused of being witches were arrested and tortured until they confessed. The torture was so painful that people made false confessions to escape more torture. After “confessing,” the accused were burned at the stake or hanged.

Later, mistrust of midwives continued, but for different reasons. In the 1600s in France, it became a sign of wealth to have a doctor deliver children instead of a midwife. By this time, some men were getting university training; but they learned about childbirth from textbooks written by other men!

These male doctors encouraged the mystery about and mistrust of midwives because they saw midwives as competition. Doctors realized that they could make a lot of money attending births, so they claimed that science and technology made doctors the better choice for delivering babies. By the early 1900s in the United States, doctors and hospitals were most popular for assisting with births, even though midwives had been handling them for ages.

Despite the lack of trust in it, midwifery didn’t die out. All over the world, midwives have always delivered more babies than doctors. In some countries, where hospitals may be too far away or a doctor may be too expensive, midwives are more likely to deliver babies even today.

Now, midwives can get formal training, and many women prefer to have midwives deliver their babies. Midwives come to people’s homes to help with deliveries, or they assist in the hospital, right along with doctors and nurses. The reputation of midwives is finally on the mend after taking a beating from some ugly superstitions!

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