Desert Birthright

The coming-of-age memoir of a homebirth midwife in the Southwest Lori Wrankle was sixteen when she helped deliver her first baby. "I witnessed the entire universe unfold at my feet," she writes in Desert Birthright. Later, working as a hospital doula, Wrankle observed firsthand the suffering inflicted upon birthing women by male-dominated Western childbirth practices, from casual racism to unnecessary and nonconsensual procedures, including the dreaded "husband stitch." After a traumatic labor and delivery of her own, she decided to take back woman-centered childbirth and start a homebirth midwifery practice. Desert Birthright traverses twenty-five years of midwifery, often in fundamentalist polygamist circles, weaving together birth stories with childhood memories as Wrankle grapples with her shifting Mormon faith. Her poetic voice shines--a placenta becomes the tree of life, the folds in a baby's arm layers of sand in the desert. Desert Birthright is a deeply personal story of life, death, and modern womanhood in the rural Southwest, and of one midwife's journey of faith, self-discovery, and liberation in the face of adversity.