08/22/2025
✨ The Womb Wound: Birth, Midwives, and the Fracture of Sovereignty ✨
For thousands of years, women have been the keepers of birth. Midwives across Indigenous nations and early settler communities in North America held the responsibility of guiding life earthside with herbs, prayers, hands-on wisdom, and ancestral authority. Birth was never only a biological event; it was spiritual governance—a covenant between women, families, and Spirit.
In the mid-1800s, this sovereignty began to unravel in what is now Utah.
🌎 Midwives and Sovereignty
The Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formally set apart women as midwives and healers as early as 1852 (Ulrich, 1992). These women anointed the sick with oil, blessed birthing mothers, and carried the authority of sacred medicine. At the same time, Indigenous nations such as the Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute held midwives as cultural anchors, linking women’s bodies to land, ancestors, and survival (Callister, 2021).
Both groups held birth as sovereignty: the right to govern life, lineage, and health within their own communities.
⚔️ Colonization and the Fracture
Three interconnected forces disrupted this sovereignty:
Colonization of Land
The Bear River Massacre of 1863, where U.S. troops killed between 250–500 Northwestern Shoshone, was more than a battle—it was the destruction of villages where women birthed and raised children (Madsen, 1985). To kill women and children was to sever ancestral birth lines and uproot the sacred order of life.
Colonization of Birth
Mormon women’s midwifery authority began sovereign, but by the 1870s Brigham Young sent selected women East for medical training. This marked the beginning of professionalization—shifting midwifery into institutional medicine (Bradley, 1990). By Utah’s statehood in 1896, midwifery was no longer a sovereign women’s circle but subject to state regulation.
Colonization of Women’s Rights
In 1870, Utah women became the first in the U.S. to vote—an extraordinary act of sovereignty (Firmage & Mangrum, 1974). Yet, this right was stripped by the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887, part of the federal government’s campaign against Mormon polygamy and power. Women regained suffrage in 1896 when Utah became a state, but only under terms dictated by federal and state authority.
🌿 The Pattern
Taking land = taking wombs.
Killing midwives = severing sovereignty.
Professionalizing medicine = removing women’s spiritual authority.
What was once sovereign, sacred, and community-held became state-regulated, bureaucratic, and patriarchal.
✨ The Healing
This history reveals a womb wound of colonization—not just for Mormon women or Indigenous women, but for all women. Healing this fracture requires:
Honoring Indigenous midwives and lineages that were cut short.
Restoring sovereignty to birth through community midwifery, doula networks, and sacred ceremony.
Naming the betrayal of systems—including the church—that chose assimilation over protecting women’s embodied power.
Reclaiming birth as governance: a fundamental right of women and families to choose how life enters the world.
💫 Closing Invocation
"To remember is to restore.
Birth is sovereignty.
Womb is nation.
Midwife is keeper.
When we reclaim her,
We mend the fracture of the millennium."
📚 References (APA Style)
Bradley, M. (1990). Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier. Salt Lake City: Signature Books.
Callister, S. M. (2021). Indigenous Midwives and Women’s Healing Traditions in the Intermountain West. Utah Historical Quarterly, 89(4), 292–314.
Firmage, E. B., & Mangrum, R. C. (1974). Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Madsen, B. D. (1985). The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Ulrich, L. T. (1992). A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Vintage.
