Clare Loprinzi is a traditional midwife of thirty years. I am the mother of three wonderful grown children, a fantastic son-in-law, all who work in medicine and education. My other half of thirty-one years and love of my life is a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist. I love gardening and working toward peace in the world, believing that peaceful birth brings peaceful warriors to today’s world.

Bringing Traditional Midwifery Back Home and Beyond

My line of Sicilian le mammane (midwives) has been helping women birth since the beginning of time. Our ways have not changed. We know that birthing is natural and a woman has the ability to birth simply and safely. We have never relied on machines, drugs and the modern technology to help with birth, relying instead on old ways and medicinal herbs. I have spent thirty four years working with women in birth and am honored to continue in this line of le mammane. This line will always stay connected as long as there is life on this earth. It has a deep connection to the earth that will always survive. It just takes one of us to eat the figs and dream birth to wake up the memories of our mammana. I was one of these girls that like my ancestors who love figs since I can remember. These trees, which my grandparents planted when they came to the United States, would keep me connected to these traditional midwifery ways. Wherever I move I bring a branch of these figs that originally came from Sicilia to my gardens. The messages that were carried on in my family line, the work with the breath and the healthy life style that came from the strong peasants would be the foundation of my life and would ripple through to my work. I would birth all three of my children at home easily. I would realize after the birth of my second child that I was a midwife and the knowledge was inside of me. I knew birth because I was born with this motherwit like the le mammana before me. My life soon would be connected to the last of the traditional midwives in North America who would talk the birthing stories with me, as my nonna would have. To these wise women I have the greatest of respect and gratitude. Their stories have helped guide me in my work. Honoring all of them and especially Ms. Margaret Charles Smith for their ways and stories. They are still strong and alive throughout the world. They are about the midwives who help with this preparation of the mother and baby who make this journey together. This is an ancient ceremony of life that both mothers and babies are born knowing. A time where this connection to mother earth and all the forces connected to this power comes alive in both mother and baby. The mammana works with her prenatally to prepare her for this wondrous journey. These are the ways of the mammana, the traditional Sicilian midwife.

Traditional midwives in Sicilia were le comari, the women who bonded with the original dark mother and with each other and carried the values of the goddess into the historic era. These were the peasant women who helped with birthing, marrying, sickness and dying. These women were the traditional midwives, deeply tuned into the cycles of mother earth and birth. If the midwife came into the house and saw that the dishes needing washing, the house cleaned up, the woman needed help, she did just that. When we study the plight of midwives in history, we see that women held an important place in society and healing. These women, educated by other women and the knowledge was passed down through oral tradition, hands on education and through working with the innate knowledge that we have, Motherwit, common sense. The midwife assisted in birth and many other aspects of healing. Women had herbal knowledge that kept the people healthy in mind, body and spirit keeping societies in balance with the earth.

The killings of these women, started in the 13th century in Europe, would open up opportunities for men to take up the work that women did. This change from women to men doing the work would have grave consequences on society. Birth would be controlled, drugs would replace herbal medicines, and birth would be a medical problem instead of an empowered ceremony of life. Women were now the ones that seduced men into sex, which was considered the work of the devil. The Catholic Church vowed that sex was wrong. Procreation ceremonies would be replaced with religious control. Ritual times and ceremonies that connected humans to nature would be replaced. The solstice and equinox ceremonies that held great importance in birth, life and the connection to our ancestors would eventually be replaced with Christmas, Easter, and Halloween. The wise women(midwives) would eventually turn into black scary witches, the black Madonna would be turned into a virgin white woman and any rituals that were to survive would have to be kept in secret. The churches claimed women who worked in the healing field obtained her power from sexuality and that sex was conceived with the devil. Birth was now a time for women to suffer for her wrongs. Drugs and men would control birth and all aspects of healing. Healing would now be for the ruling class only and again the peasant class would be attacked. These wise women now labeled, as witches would be sought after. As stated by the Catholic churches main witch-hunters, Kramer and Sprenger, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than the midwives. This “magic” that the midwives used was not medicine and it was the devil himself who was controlling this “magic.” Birth was to become the punishment that women had to endure for these sins that were believed to have started with the original sin of Eve.

As the women who were in direct connection with this original sin were being tortured and killed, the ruling class was preparing the ground for their own “healers”. These would be university-trained men that were trained scientifically. The church had strict control on this education. Healing work would now be a profession and the “father of modern medicine”, Paracelsus in 1527, would burn his text on pharmaceuticals and confess that all that he had learned was from sorceress. This now set the ground for only men, as even upper class ruling women would not be allowed, and licensing laws to govern “medicine”. Women who dared to work in healing would be burned at the stake. There now was a strong alliance between the church, state and the medical profession, which showed it strength in the witch trials. The doctor would be the “expert” and as stated in the Malleus, “And if it was asked how it is possible to distinguish whether an illness was caused by witchcraft or by some natural physical defect, the answer was by the judgment of doctors. Women that dared to heal would be killed. These trials would not only put men in power but create the present day doctor lawyer situation that is prevalent in western states. No where is this relationship more apparent than in present day obstetrics in the United States, where now obstetricians are fleeing from the high cost of malpractice insurance and birth has become a 26 billion dollar industry controlled by drugs and machines. In the 17th and 18th centuries males were ready to move into the last of the women’s roles, the midwife. The barber-surgeons led the first attack on women by creating this technical intrusion on women known as forceps. Although women midwives in England organized against this barbaric device and charged these men with commercialism and downright dangerous methods, the women were told they were ignorant. The courts and the medical establishment was well set up with males controlling the courts, the church and the newly established medicinal practices and learning facilities. These English midwives would be shut down. Even back in 1846, the Hungarian doctor Semmelweis who worked in a maternity hospital noted that the maternal mortality rate in the male medical ward exceeded the midwives’ ward by 437%. Semmelweis validated the theory that Sr. Dr. Holmes had presented that performing frequent vaginal exams without washing hands between patients spreads disease. Holmes had been publicly ridiculed for thinking such an outrageous idea. For traditional midwives routine “vaginal” exams were not necessary. The sacred opening that babies were born from was now labeled as a vagina, whose literal meaning is” the sheath that the soldiers held their swords in”. Birth was now complicated, drugged and controlled by the ruling class men. There was one country however in Europe that kept the role of the midwife alive and safe. Holland would be the place that midwives would flee to if possible to stay alive. Their influence is apparent in modern day birth in Holland.

Modern day ultrasound (dopplers and sonograms) are another stress factor for the baby. “The largest study of its kind to date states that routine ultrasound does not benefit mothers or babies in terms of pregnancy outcome. It did not reduce the number of infant or maternal deaths and did not lead to better care for the newborn. The only thing it did was exposing the families to increased cost and risk. A study in Helsinki showed that the physiotherapists who used ultrasound equipment for 20 hours a week had a significant increase of spontaneous abortion.” Studies of ultrasound on the fetus showed cell abnormalities, delayed speech, preterm labor, poorer condition at birth, lower birth rates, loss of brain cells in the developing fetus that leads to mental impairment and damage to the myelin sheath that covers the nerves. It must be recognized that both mother and baby deserve to be treated respectfully in all birthing protocols. These machines not only tell nurses, physicians and many midwives how the baby is but support the litigation cases in courts. Respect for and understanding of natural birth is being lost by those practioneers who use these tools and drugs.

Understanding the history of the past couple hundred years and staying connected the Motherwit that traditional midwives hold allows the traditional midwife to carry on ways of birthing since the first birth on earth. We are here as we always have been, although we are only a few, we are still here and we are still bringing in babies. This webpage will allow you to take a journey into our world and experience our world of birthing naturally.