Judy Luce, Licensed Midwife, Certified Professional Midwife
Welcome! I have been a homebirth community midwife for 39 years, first as a lay midwife, then as a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) since 1994, a Licensed Midwife (LM) in Vermont since 2000, and an LM in California since 2006. I learned birth from birth — my own and the births of other women — and I learned in community with other women who desired to help women to birth at home.
I lived nine years in a women’s religious community where the spirituality that guides my midwifery was born. My initiation into feminism came through the transformative experiences of my three births, the last one at home. My midwifery was also born through these experiences.
I have been a childbirth activist and educator as well as a women's health activist for nearly four decades, inspired and mentored by members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective (Our Bodies Ourselves) in the early 1970s. My passion for women and birth led me to speak at universities, high schools, medical schools, and senior citizen coffee klatches about the power of giving birth at home and the ways the medical care system failed to meet the needs of women. I also was a member of a feminist writer’s group, the “Judith Collective.”
I cut my political teeth organizing against the regionalization of maternity services and for free standing birth centers, both failed efforts at the time. I was an invited participant to the National Science Foundation EIRTAW Conference (Ethical Issues in Reproductive Technology: An Assessment by Women), whose challenge to medical practice still stands. I was a contributing author to the Childbirth chapter in several editions of Our Bodies Ourselves, and in the mid-1980s authored the chapter on the "Politics of Women's Health." While working with the Family Practice Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts I contributed to the text: Home Birth: A Practitioner’s Guide to Birth Outside the Hospital.
In the 1990s, I was a member of the Women’s Institute for Childbearing Policy that produced the still relevant document, Childbearing Policy Within a National Health Program: An Evolving Consensus for New Directions. In Vermont I played a central role in the passage of Midwifery licensing legislation in 2000. In 2001 I completed my Master's degree in Cultural Studies and Midwifery with my thesis: Midwives at the Margins of Life: Home Birth and Home Dying. In this work I developed the concept of midwives primarily as cultural workers, an idea that is central to my midwifery practice and critique of the medicalization of birth.
I lived nine years in a women’s religious community where the spirituality that guides my midwifery was born. My initiation into feminism came through the transformative experiences of my three births, the last one at home. My midwifery was also born through these experiences.
I have been a childbirth activist and educator as well as a women's health activist for nearly four decades, inspired and mentored by members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective (Our Bodies Ourselves) in the early 1970s. My passion for women and birth led me to speak at universities, high schools, medical schools, and senior citizen coffee klatches about the power of giving birth at home and the ways the medical care system failed to meet the needs of women. I also was a member of a feminist writer’s group, the “Judith Collective.”
I cut my political teeth organizing against the regionalization of maternity services and for free standing birth centers, both failed efforts at the time. I was an invited participant to the National Science Foundation EIRTAW Conference (Ethical Issues in Reproductive Technology: An Assessment by Women), whose challenge to medical practice still stands. I was a contributing author to the Childbirth chapter in several editions of Our Bodies Ourselves, and in the mid-1980s authored the chapter on the "Politics of Women's Health." While working with the Family Practice Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts I contributed to the text: Home Birth: A Practitioner’s Guide to Birth Outside the Hospital.
In the 1990s, I was a member of the Women’s Institute for Childbearing Policy that produced the still relevant document, Childbearing Policy Within a National Health Program: An Evolving Consensus for New Directions. In Vermont I played a central role in the passage of Midwifery licensing legislation in 2000. In 2001 I completed my Master's degree in Cultural Studies and Midwifery with my thesis: Midwives at the Margins of Life: Home Birth and Home Dying. In this work I developed the concept of midwives primarily as cultural workers, an idea that is central to my midwifery practice and critique of the medicalization of birth.
I have served as the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) regional representative, helped create MANA’s Ethics and Values Statement, presently serve on the Document Review Committee, and am a member of the California Association of Midwives.
In 1999, at the invitation of a Mayan refugee family in Vermont, I traveled to Guatemala to meet with a community of Mam-speaking midwives in the western highland town of Concepcion Chiquirichapa. Out of this meeting grew the Guatemalan Midwifery Project with its focus on promoting midwifery and protecting the health of mothers and mother earth. In 2004, after intense fundraising and bridge-building between North American midwives and their supporters and the co-madronas, I attended the dedication of Casa Maternal de Nacimiento, owned and run by Mayan midwives — a birth home, midwifery education center, community space, and clinic. I continue to work with this project.
I am the mother of three adult children and I attended the home births of my three granddaughters, Ava Lilah, Corinna Mae, and Sadie Rose. I'm humbled that my mentor, Norma Swenson, once described me as “the best philosopher of birth I know, who has the ability to see things whole and to focus always on the meanings of what we say and do."
In 1999, at the invitation of a Mayan refugee family in Vermont, I traveled to Guatemala to meet with a community of Mam-speaking midwives in the western highland town of Concepcion Chiquirichapa. Out of this meeting grew the Guatemalan Midwifery Project with its focus on promoting midwifery and protecting the health of mothers and mother earth. In 2004, after intense fundraising and bridge-building between North American midwives and their supporters and the co-madronas, I attended the dedication of Casa Maternal de Nacimiento, owned and run by Mayan midwives — a birth home, midwifery education center, community space, and clinic. I continue to work with this project.
I am the mother of three adult children and I attended the home births of my three granddaughters, Ava Lilah, Corinna Mae, and Sadie Rose. I'm humbled that my mentor, Norma Swenson, once described me as “the best philosopher of birth I know, who has the ability to see things whole and to focus always on the meanings of what we say and do."
