Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin

Ina May Gaskin with her husband Stephen were among a group of several hundred hippies in several dozen converted buses who drove across America in the late '60s before settling on the Farm in Tennessee. In the late '60s midwives had ceased to to exist as a recognised profession in the US, childbirth was entirely medicalised and medicine was (and still is) a private, corporate enterprise. Not having much money, not having "jobs" and not taking charity meant the travelling community couldn't afford hospitals and had to learn to diy childbirth. To make a long story short, from those beginnings Ina May led a revolution in antenatal and childbirth care in the US and was instrumental in getting midwifery recognised as a profession in its own right as a founding member of the Midwives Association of North America (MANA), its president from 1996 - 2002, an author of the professional qualification Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) and a founder of the qualifying authority North American Registry of Midwives (NARM). She was a visiting fellow at Yale University in 2003. In an article in Salon in 1999, she is described as, "...brilliant, politically savvy and aware -- a postmodern hippie who holds a very strong space for her alternative knowledge system yet moves with fluidity and ease in the professional, political and medical realms."