As midwives and doulas, the current collective desire to return to ancestral ways of birth is both beautiful and urgent. Across the globe, centuries of colonization, aggressive Westernization, and missionary interference systematically dismantled indigenous birthing ecosystems—demonizing our elder healers, severing oral lineages, and leaving gaping voids in maternal care. Through our Repair and Reconnect Initiative, we are actively working to mend those generational ruptures.

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