On April 1st, the administration halted funding for a network of clinics, including midwifery practices and birth centers, across the country. Title X is the only federal program solely dedicated to affordable preventive health services and family planning. It helps ensure that people who are uninsured, underinsured, or living with the impacts of poverty and systemic inequity can access birth control, STI care, and cancer screenings.

Before medical industrial maternal health systems rooted in capitalism and forced regulation, birth was seen as a sacred, harmonious, and a joyful communal experience guided with integrity for new life, where mothers and babies thrived. Before birth became controlled, commodified and capitalized, it was honored through earth-based, Indigenous practices. Midwifery has always existed—long before it was institutionalized or licensed—passed from midwife to midwife, through oral tradition and sacred apprenticeship.

There was a time when birth was sacred, when women, birthing bodies, and babies were held with reverence, love, sacred care and ancestral wisdom. Birth is a ceremony rooted in song, nature, spirit, and community. The childbirth journey historically has been guided by midwives anchored with calm nervous systems who brought balance, harmony and ancestral knowing into homes and birthing rooms, who walked with medicine and care as healers, storytellers, and spiritual protectors, carrying the knowledge of generations in their bones, hands, and hearts.