Ina May Gaskin

Gaskin is a lay midwife with no nursing or medical degree, who learned by attending births on a caravan convoy and then at The Farm, the Tennessee commune she helped found in 1971. A manoeuvre for freeing a baby's shoulder carries her name, adopted from Guatemalan midwives, and it appears in obstetric textbooks. Spiritual Midwifery and her later guides argue that most birth needs patience rather than intervention and that fear itself slows labour. Obstetricians dispute her outcome statistics, which come from a self-selected low-risk population, and the safety argument around home birth remains unsettled. She is much of the reason the word midwife recovered standing in America.