What Birth Around the World Has Taught Me to Question

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I have always been deeply curious about why humans do the things we do. With a background in anthropology and sociology, I have spent years exploring why people believe what they believe, and why certain systems become so normalized that we forget they were created by people in the first place.

For me, this lens is both a reminder and an inspiration: everything around us is made up, and therefore, everything can be rewritten.

Birth is a system in great need of a new narrative.

Maternal health is not only medicine. It is also an industry. A very expensive industry. And like all systems, it was made. Which means it can be questioned. Which means it can be changed.

That belief is at the heart of Wombs of the World. Over the years, learning alongside traditional midwives, birthkeepers, and providers in Tanzania, Ecuador, Mexico, and South Africa, I have watched so many of my own beliefs about birth, motherhood, medicine, and what we consider "normal" break open. This is some of what the world has taught me to question, and what we offer because of it.

What I was taught about birth

Much of what I first thought about birth was shaped by the system I was trained inside. In the Western medical model, birth is often treated as a risk to manage, a body to monitor, a liability to reduce, and a patient to move through a protocol.

And yes, modern medicine saves lives. I want to say that clearly. I have seen emergencies where skilled providers and clinical knowledge made the difference between life and death. I am not interested in romanticizing the past. Women and babies died in childbirth. They still do.

But I am also not interested in pretending that the Western medical model is the highest expression of birth care humanity has ever created.

Even the position many women are expected to give birth in has a history. There is a popular story that King Louis XIV's fascination with watching women give birth helped popularize birthing on their backs in France. Whether or not that story explains the full shift, it reveals something important: even the positions we now treat as standard were shaped by culture, power, observation, and control.

For most of human history, birth happened at home, in community, attended largely by women. Then birth moved from home to hospital, from women's hands to men's institutions, from communal knowledge to professional authority, from ceremony to procedure. This shift brought life-saving tools. But we also have to be honest about what was lost.

Women who had spent decades catching babies and passing down knowledge were often dismissed as uneducated or dangerous. And the field of obstetrics and gynecology did not emerge innocently. It was shaped by racism, experimentation, colonialism, and the dismissal of women's embodied knowledge, especially the knowledge of Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor, and traditional birthkeepers.

What the world has taught me

When I travel with Wombs of the World, I am not looking for some perfect, untouched version of birth. That does not exist. No culture is perfect. No birth system is perfect. But when we leave the center of our own worldview, we begin to see what our own systems erased.

In Ecuador, one of our teachers, Partera di Anaku, shared with us about the Temazcal, a traditional sweat lodge often described as the womb of Mother Earth. The community we visited had revived the practice of birthing in Temazcals, built tall enough to stand in, with a rope hanging from the ceiling so the laboring woman can pull down with her strength. Fire tenders and loved ones stay nearby, tending the hot stones, praying, playing music, and holding the space for days. You cannot birth in a Temazcal alone.

You need community.

You need ceremony.

The more I travel, the more I believe that so much of what we call modern birth trauma is not only about what happens medically. It is also about what has been removed spiritually, culturally, and relationally.

In Tanzania, I have stood in crowded maternity wards with limited supplies, limited beds, and limited privacy. I have witnessed infant loss due to limited neonatal resources, and there is nothing romantic about a lack of oxygen, water, transport, or equipment. And yet, Tanzania has also taught me some of my deepest lessons. I once watched a mother's labor slow every time a group of male doctors walked in to observe her. Her body knew. Then I watched what happened when women surrounded her, a doula reminded the room that birth takes time, and she was supported with position changes, counterpressure, and the kind of presence that says: we are with you. And then she brought her baby earthside.

Sometimes the intervention is not more control. Sometimes the intervention is privacy. Sometimes the intervention is women. And sometimes the intervention is surgery, oxygen, antibiotics, or a skilled physician moving quickly. These truths are not enemies.

In Mexico, I have sat with traditional birthkeepers and remembered that postpartum care is not supposed to be an afterthought. The closing of the body, the warming of the mother, the tending of the womb. These are not cute cultural extras. They are technologies of care. A rebozo is technology. A warm broth is technology. A grandmother's hands are technology. Many of these have lasted for generations because they work.

In South Africa, I have been reminded again and again that birth cannot be separated from history: from race, land, colonization, apartheid, poverty, resilience, grief, and the long memory of women's bodies.

This is one of the greatest lessons the world has taught me: birth is never just birth. When a woman gives birth, she is not only bringing forward a baby. She is bringing forward every story she has inherited about her body, her worth, her safety, her pain, her power, and her place in the world.

The questions I carry now

In the Western world, we have forgotten so much of that. Motherhood has become isolated. Postpartum has become rushed. Care has become something we purchase if we can afford it. In the United States, we do not even have federal paid leave for new mothers. A country with some of the most expensive maternal health care in the world cannot guarantee mothers paid time to heal, bond, bleed, feed, sleep, and become.

So the world has taught me to ask better questions.

Why do we separate mothers and babies so quickly? Why do we rush postpartum recovery? Why are so many people afraid of birth? Why is pain treated only as suffering, and never as sensation with meaning? Why do some communities gather around a new mother for weeks, while others expect her to be alone after two days? Why do we call some knowledge evidence-based and other knowledge folklore, even when both have been tested across generations?

These questions have changed how I teach. They have changed how I doula. They have changed how I understand power.

What Wombs of the World offers

I do not believe we need to choose between modern medicine and ancestral wisdom. I believe we need both.

I want the operating room available when it is needed. I also want the laboring person encouraged to move, eat, drink, breathe, vocalize, and be held. I want antibiotics, blood banks, skilled surgeons, and neonatal resuscitation. I also want postpartum soup, warm hands, closing rituals, community care, and reverence.

I want science.

I want ceremony.

I want a world mature enough to hold them both.

This is what Wombs of the World means when we say: Ancestral wisdom. Modern knowledge. Collective care. It is not a slogan to me. It is a framework. And it shapes everything we offer:

Global learning programs in Tanzania, Ecuador, Mexico, and South Africa, where birthworkers learn directly from traditional midwives and birthkeepers about ceremony, postpartum care, rebozo traditions, herbal knowledge, and maternal health systems, built on long-term, reciprocal relationships.
The Full-Spectrum Doula Training, which prepares doulas to support families with both clinical understanding and cultural humility. Learn more.
The Wombs of the World Summit, March 18 to 20, 2027, at Huerto Roma Verde in Mexico City, where traditional midwives, birthworkers, and providers gather across cultures to learn from one another.

No single system has everything figured out. The West has much to offer and much to unlearn. Traditional systems have much to offer, and they too exist within real human complexity. But when we gather across cultures with humility, something becomes possible.

Birth belongs to all of us

Birth is not only medical. It is not only spiritual. It is not only personal. It is not only political.

It is all of it.

And if we are brave enough to hold that complexity, maybe we can build systems of care that are not only safer, but more human.

If this resonates, I would love to learn alongside you. Find us on all social platforms @wombsoftheworld, explore our programs at wombsoftheworld.com, or reach me directly at charlotte@wombsoftheworld.com.

Walk gently, listen deeply, and remember that birth belongs to all of us.