Ina May Gaskin is a Certified Professional Midwife, who has been described as "the mother of authentic midwifery." Gaskin, and her husband Stephen Gaskin, founded the famous intentional community, The Farm, in Summertown Tennessee, in 1971. There, Ina May and "The Midwives" of the Farm, created the first out-of-hospital birth center in the United States.

Gaskin has been attributed with the emergence and popularization of direct-entry midwifery in the United States since the early 1970s. She is publisher of the periodical Birth Gazette and an internationally-known speaker on maternity care issues for the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA)

She is the author of Spiritual Midwifery (The Book Publishing Co., 1977) and Ina May's Guide to Childbirth 2003.

She is also the founder of the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project. The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project is a national effort developed to draw public attention to the current maternal death rates and to honor those women who have died of pregnancy-related causes during the past twenty years.^*

External links

• Ina May Gaskin Official website
• Safe Motherhood Quilt Project

People in alternative medicine | American non-fiction writers | Midwives