How Language Was Used to Erase Midwives, Control Women, and Rewrite Birth Itself

What if everything you’ve been taught about birth was shaped—intentionally—by the people who stood to profit from your obedience?

What if the words “deliver,” “patient,” “noncompliant,” and “failure to progress” weren’t neutral at all—but the building blocks of a silent, generational captivity?

Birth in Captivity is a bold, rigorously academic, and spiritually confrontational exposé on how language has been used to strip women of sovereignty in childbirth—and how we reclaim it.

Written for midwives, doulas, birthworkers, educators, and every mother who has ever felt erased by her own chart, this expanded edition includes:

• The historical erasure of Indigenous, Black, enslaved, and immigrant midwives through medical “reform”

• The rise of obstetrics as a weaponized vocabulary, not just a profession

• The eugenic roots of “safety” language, birth licensing, and reproductive compliance

• The neuroscience behind how words change pain, labor progression, and hormonal flow

• The silent legal structures embedded in informed consent and hospital documentation

• The trauma women carry not from interventions—but from what was said to them while it happened

• A full chapter of peer-reviewed research connecting birth language to physiological and emotional outcomes

• A linguistic toolset to decolonize your birth plans, your client forms, your mouth, and your memory

This is not a book of birth stories. This is a historical, legal, and neurobiological reckoning.
If Witches, Midwives, and Nurses gave you a lens, and Spiritual Midwifery gave you hope, Birth in Captivity will give you your sword.

Your womb was never the property of the state.
Your language doesn’t belong to the system.
Your birth was never meant to be managed.
It was meant to be declared.

This book will not comfort you. It will confront you.
And then it will call you to reclaim the most powerful place on earth: the word-born, God-made, blood-guarded space where mothers are made.