ABSTRACT
The origins of the term midwife speak to, and about, the current crisis in midwifery: what kind of person should a midwife be, and what should she do? In English, midwife means “a woman who is with the mother at birth.” To use the word midwife is thus to refer to a long tradition of alliance between the women giving birth and the women attending them. As a matter of fact, the term obstetric originally carried the same meaning; in the mid-eighteenth century, the Latin word obstetrix began to be used to refer to “a woman who is present to receive the child.”
