SXSW '25: Arrest the Midwife is a Vibrant and Necessary Call to Action

What is the purpose of education, fundamentally? Simplistically, it’s to substitute for learned experience. Thousands of years ago, someone eats a poisoned mushroom and drops dead. Someone else sees this. Lesson learned: that mushroom is poisonous. Education takes the place of having to learn something the hard way, through trial and error and dangerous mistakes. But what purpose does education serve when it’s not teaching, but simply gatekeeping? 

In Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife, which had its World Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival, three midwives who predominantly serve Amish and Mennonite communities are arrested and charged with practicing midwifery without a valid license. That is technically true: all three women hold a Certified Practicing Midwife license, a certification recognized in 37 states… but not in New York, where they were arrested. In New York, a midwife has to provide documentation of a Master’s degree or higher degree program in midwifery—not an easy task for most people. As the documentary continues, it becomes abundantly clear that this is not a cut-and-dry case of simple regulations and license accreditation, but a concerted effort by the state of New York to completely dismantle the practice of independent midwifery. One woman is charged with 95 separate charges, including a felony and one charge alleging her responsible for the death of a newborn.

The conversation around reproductive rights in America often focuses on abortion access. It’s a deeply important subject, but as Arrest The Midwife explores, the issues of women’s choice and bodily autonomy being curtailed by male-dominated legal spaces goes far beyond that one node. The women of Amish and Mennonite communities are not being served by the current healthcare system: not by the price, not by the distance between their homes and the hospitals, and not by the doctors ignorant of their way of life and uninterested in bridging that gap. 

A worse version of this documentary would come off as leering as it interviews the men and women of the Amish and Mennonite communities. Their presence in pop culture is dominated by the strangeness of their self-imposed solitude from American norms. Instead, Epstein and her team find commonalities between the communities and the outside world in subtle ways, highlighting little moments of a mother’s mild frustration at a rambunctious child or a community fundraiser for Haiti earthquake relief. This all coalesces to emphasize that the issue at the heart of the documentary is happening to real, relatable humans.

And, as the film acknowledges, it’s a problem shared by BIPOC communities traditionally and contemporaneously ignored and mistreated by white male doctors. These communities have significantly higher infant mortality rates than their white counterparts. Midwives, especially practicing midwives from these communities and familiar with their struggle, bridge the gap and provide more extensive care… unless they live in New York. By connecting the supposedly insular struggle that the Amish and Mennonite communities face with BIPOC people in the heart of New York City, Epstein reminds the viewer that this is not a widespread problem confined to a small area.

It’s a painfully timely issue, and there is some nuance to the conversation. In the Q&A following the film’s premiere, Epstein clarified that her film is not an attempt to position home birth with a midwife as inarguably superior to a hospital birth with a doctor. Instead, Arrest The Midwife is about choice—who gets to make it and who has to live with it.

For the Amish and Mennonite communities, generally insular and actively disinterested in engaging with national and state politics, it’s a motivating cataclysm. Epstein’s film follows community leaders and mothers who are able to look clear-eyed at a future in which they have no access to medical care without their midwives—a future that is inevitably going to negatively impact their lives.  In order to retain their way of life, they are forced into the spotlight to defend and speak for their midwives, building a politically activated community that can hopefully bring about some needed change. And while the film builds toward a triumphant climax as their communities are recognized and championed by some of those in power, the filmmakers remain clear-eyed that it takes more than letters, state assembly appearances, and a sympathetic politician to bring about lasting change.

The bill meant to legalize midwifery in New York state is still in limbo; one of the midwives featured in the documentary had to forgo her practice in order to avoid prison time. This is not an issue that’s going away, especially as rights are stripped away, gleefully, by those in power.

But maybe communities can come together, and maybe political awareness and participation can be awakened and stoked by shared struggles. Even if the outlook for change looks hazy, it’s hard not to tear up at a moment in which one midwife poses for a photo with dozens of the children she’d delivered and the mothers she’d helped. Arrest The Midwife is a powerful reminder that we are all we have, that our similarities are more striking than our differences, and that the people we’ve helped can and will go on to help others.

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