We burned midwives because male physicians wanted that revenue! And the fear of death in childbirth has a lot to do with this. The most dangerous era in childbirth was when women stopped having well-trained midwives and started giving birth in filthy hospitals under the “care” of men who didn’t know nearly as much about birth as the midwives did, and who did not yet have modern tools like cesareans for the most dangerous births. Semmelweis tried to convince doctors to wash the heir dirty hands and they drove him out. Check the birth stats of colonial midwife Martha Ballard and of the mother of modern midwifery, Ina May Gaskin. (One of us needs to write about this!)