Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)
speaker
1,029 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The American Medical Association, branding the midwives impossibly dirty, incompetent, ignorant, and unscientific, successfully lobbied state legislatures to pass strict, restrictive licensing laws that made it near impossible for traditional lay midwives to serve women with fertility, abortion, and childbirth care.
The midwives who were too scientific to live centuries before were now cast as too unscientific to practice.
The radical change happened with lightning speed.
In 1900, nearly 100% of births were at home attended by midwives.
By 1950, more than 80% of deliveries were in hospitals attended by licensed physicians.
Now licensed male doctors had a monopoly on the newfound economic and social power of medicine and who and who would not get abortions.
By the end of the 19th century, nearly every state had enacted criminal abortion laws.
The legal transformation happened as quickly as the medical revolution.
In just a few decades, what had once been governed largely through common law, local practice, and community norms became increasingly regulated through criminal statutes and physician oversight.
Then as now, making abortion illegal neither eliminated the need for abortion nor prevented its practice.
In the 1890s, doctors estimated that there were 2 million abortions a year in the United States.
That's compared to 1.1 million today.
Through the church-controlled witch trials, any woman who heals must be a witch, and any witch must be killed.
Through the professionalization of medicine, anyone who heals without being a doctor is outlawed.
A woman cannot be a doctor, so any woman healer is outlawed.
Through both, the healers became the demons.
Through both, any woman seeking healing outside what the church law and government ordains is marked forever with suspicion and superstition, which all institutions must be on guard to control.
This is how, through both witch trials and through the professionalization of medicine, we lost not only the lives of countless wise women healers through torture and murder, but lost centuries of wisdom about women's health and lost autonomy over our own fertility and reproduction.
Because in order to officially withhold something, you cannot have the knowledge and wisdom and abilities unregulated outside of official control.
You have to first control the means by which that thing is administered.
Showing 161–180 of 1,029 · page 9 of 52
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