In 1976, midwife Ina May Gaskin published Spiritual Midwifery, with other editions published in 1980, 1990, and 2003. Spiritual Midwifery is a book about pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, or the time period after birth. During the 1970s, it was common for women to receive an epidural, a medication that reduces pain during labor, and for physicians to monitor a fetus’s heartbeat while separating women from their infants after birth. However, according to Gaskin, some women wanted to give birth outside of the hospital without medical interventions. Spiritual Midwifery is a collection of birth stories from women, information about pregnancy and giving birth, and instructions to midwives on how to care for women during childbirth and the period that followed. In Spiritual Midwifery, Gaskin introduced homebirth and midwifery to a broader audience, which helped repopularize midwifery in the US.

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski published Not of Woman Born in 1990. The book is a historical account of the cesarean birth procedure, hereafter c-section, during the Renaissance in Europe. A c-section is a surgical procedure that medical professionals use to deliver a fetus through an incision in a pregnant person’s abdomen. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, midwives performed c-sections on pregnant women after they had died when there was a chance that the fetus was still alive. They did this so the midwife could get the baby baptized, enabling it to be buried in sacred ground after death. Not of Woman Born traces how the procedure evolved in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century to be more commonly performed by male surgeons, rather than midwives, to save both the mother and the fetus. Blumenfeld-Kosinski provides historical, religious, and cultural context for understanding how people viewed and practiced c-sections in Europe during medieval and Renaissance times, in contrast to how people view and rely on the widespread delivery procedure in modern times.