On July 2, 2026, fittingly, the week before Independence Day, a lawsuit was filed in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania that could change the future of traditional midwifery in this state for generations.
If you’ve never heard of the Midwife Regulation Law of 1929, you’re not alone. But it may be the most important law you’ve never heard of. Since 1929, Pennsylvania law has required traditional midwives to hold a certificate from the state in order to practice legally and it has required the state to issue those certificates to qualified midwives who apply. Simple enough, right?
Except the state stopped issuing them. Not recently. DECADES ago. There is no application form. There is no process. There is no answer. Traditional midwives who have applied, paid the required fee, and followed up again and again have been met with total silence.
The result is an impossible trap: The law says midwives need a certificate, and the state refuses to give one to anyone. Midwives who have spent their lives serving Pennsylvania families (including Amish and Mennonite communities whose faith calls them to give birth at home!) have been left practicing in legal limbo, at risk of investigation or prosecution simply for doing their jobs.
Now, that ends up in court. This new lawsuit asks a judge to do something remarkable in its simplicity: Make the Commonwealth follow its own law. Issue the certificates. Protect the midwives. And clarify that a vaguely written new law taking effect this week — Act 14 — does nothing to change the rights of traditional midwives under the 1929 law.
Roberta has been fighting this fight for over thirty years
For those of us in the Mountain Laurel Midwifery community, this moment doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is the continuation of a fight Roberta Devers has been waging her entire career.
For more than thirty years and over 1,700 births, Roberta has done more than catch babies. She has been a fierce, tireless, public advocate for the right of Pennsylvania families to choose where and with whom they give birth. She has stood up in federal court on behalf of midwives. She has spoken out, loudly and on the record, against legislation like SB507 that threatened to squeeze traditional midwifery out of existence in Pennsylvania. She has worked alongside organizations like the National Alliance for Traditional Birth Rights to organize, educate, and mobilize the birth community. And she has poured her own resources into the legal fight to protect this profession, funding advocacy work birth by birth, family by family.
She has done all of this while continuing to show up — at 2 a.m., in snowstorms, in farmhouse bedrooms and city apartments — for the families who trust her with the most important moments of their lives.
When Roberta talks about this fight, she doesn’t talk about herself. She talks about the future. In her words: “The lawsuit just filed was a long, hard birth and it’s not over. This was for all midwives, women, our daughters, and our granddaughters.”
Why this matters to you
Maybe you’ve had a home birth. Maybe you’re planning one. Maybe you’d never choose one yourself but you believe families should have the right to decide.
This case is about all of it. It’s about whether the state can regulate a profession into extinction not by passing a law, but by simply refusing to follow one. It’s about religious freedom for communities whose traditions require home birth. It’s about whether the next generation of midwives will be able to train, practice, and serve openly and legally or whether this ancient, essential calling will be pushed into the shadows.
Midwives have been catching babies since biblical times. Pennsylvania’s own law has recognized their right to practice for nearly a century. This lawsuit simply asks the Commonwealth to honor it.
What happens next
The court has been asked to act quickly — before Act 14 takes effect — and hearings could happen within days. We’ll share updates as this case moves forward.
In the meantime, here’s what you can do:
Share this post. Most Pennsylvanians have no idea this is happening, and awareness matters.
Support the organizations fighting for birth rights, like the National Alliance for Traditional Birth Rights (natbr.org).
And if you’ve ever been touched by midwifery care, tell your story. Every family who speaks up makes it harder to pretend this profession doesn’t matter.
It was a long, hard birth. It’s not over.
But for the first time in a long time, there’s real hope that the babies of Pennsylvania — our daughters, our granddaughters, and theirs — will be caught by legal midwives for hundreds of years to come.
Read the files for yourself: