Many days, whole weeks, I just want to deliver babies. The problem with that approach is that the personal really is political in the realm of birth and midwifery. Making birth autonomy with safe, committed, and supportive assistance available for every birthing person has never been further from our day to day reality anywhere in the world than it is today. As we become more visible we face more attempts to control our profession from outside, and, worse, to tell birthing people, what they can and cannot do, and how we can and cannot help them. We face attempts from inside to professionalize that move midwifery care beyond the means of many of the world's women as we attempt to earn salaries from it, and also, too often, beyond the realm of safe, physiologic, care. We will not keep our superior outcomes if we become just like everyone else in western healthcare!

My dream is for every person who gives birth to have the midwife they want to have who is well and safely trained and educated to be able to support their autonomy at birth. To do that, birth needs to be restored to our communities where it is visible. It needs to be normal again. It needs midwives of conviction who quietly walk forward with people who decline to be chopped meat in a battle for control and insist that there is something better, that normal, healthy, autonomous, physiologic birth is a right of all birthing people.

We must educate everyone from childhood on sexuality, reproductive health, normal birth, birth options, birth choices, and birth justice. We must have thoroughly educated midwives with unimpeachable credentials, so that no one in the healthcare professions can credibly argue about whether we are qualified, who are available everywhere in the world, in every community. We must be inextricably linked to the wise women who are already there from the traditional healing communities, who have so much to teach us and so much to offer to the safe care of all birthing people.  

We must be entirely self-regulating, both in our professional organizations, and in our legal structures, brooking no outside interference but open to collaboration, as is the case for other professions that have successfully grown themselves. and maintained their autonomy, and we need communication among all the midwifery regulatory bodies of the Earth. This implies the maturity to know how both assertion of our own interests and cooperation work in professional organizing and regulatory structures.

  We must have a supportive rather than punitive orientation toward ourselves and others (i.e. let us use the midwifery model of care on ourselves) to further our review of ourselves and the growth of our profession. So, this, too, must be done a whole new way.

Each of us must always remember that this work is never going to get easy if we are doing it well. Each of us would do well to remember that we may at any moment be required to walk away from material security we have built or titles we have acquired so that we stay open to change, unattached to security, pure in our work. Each of us has been called, and each of us will be directed if we listen. Each birther deserves the best we can give. Each time we give a birthing person our best we engage in revolutionary healing for that person, that birth, and the planet.