In Nigeria, where the lineage of birthkeeping stretches back millennia, the Agbẹ̀bí do not merely deliver babies—they hold the spiritual and physical continuum of life. Their hands carry the memory of generations, guiding souls into this world with an authority born of the land itself. Yet across the globe, an ongoing crisis in maternal outcomes persists because dominant medical systems have spent decades treating birth as a purely mechanical event, stripping away culture and