Into the wild I'm going, into the wild I am, it's been a wild freedom child since I left my roots back home.

Into the wild I'm going, into the wild I am.

Into the wild freedom child since I left my roots back home.

Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast.

This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood, and beyond.

Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative,

we'll explore the politics of birth, and we'll analyze everything that relates to our lives as women from a feminist perspective.

Here's your host Emily Faldin.

Historian Anna Sabrina comes on the show today to cover the time period in American history of 1750 to 1820.

This time period is marked when male physicians began what would become a full on obstetrical takeover and effectively ruin midwifery as it has stood for thousands of years.

Join us on a depressing and important history lesson so that we can understand where we've come from and perhaps glean insight into how to interrupt the cycles of male domination in which we accidentally protect and perpetuate.

Okay, Anna Sabrina, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited for this. So today we're going to take our listeners down down a historical rabbit hole.

We're going to be talking about the transition in time in American history where culture shifted from midwifery into obstetrics.

This is an area of research and expertise for our guest today Anna Sabrina.

So yeah, why don't you give us a little introduction about you and particularly I'm interested in why this was your choice to be your area of research.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, hi, my name is Anna Sabrina. I'm a college student, a historian and a birth keeper in the Winchester Virginia area.

And yeah, so I started doing this research for my senior seminar studying for my bachelors and I think it was really just something I was drawn to because so much of the history around birth focuses on the 20th century.

It's going to focus on the era of twilight sleep and how we got to where we are today in that time frame.

So I was really looking at the origins of the United States as a country and how did we get from this normal state of midwifery led care and female led care and childbirth being the work of women to the work of men and just how did that become normal.

So yeah, question I ask myself every day. No, of course, and I think you know it's something that I get asked so often by you know women my age or just you know moms that I work with where they're like why is it like this.

...