Midwives have always been associated with magic. Sorcery or witchcraft depending on how generous you were feeling.
Νot gonna lie, we can do impressive magic!  We have vampire fingers, able to locate the most recalcitrant veins and coax enough of your blood into the test-tube.  We have x-ray hands, able to work out what position your little contortionist baby is in, and pinpoint her heartbeat just like that; we can read minds, you just have to think water and we’re already on it, handing you your freshly-filled water bottle; we can hold some impossible poses for a crazy long time if we think it’ll get the baby feeding or if you’re in the water and that’s the only way we’ll hear baby’s heartbeat; we know you are fully dilated just by listening to you; we have an uncanny ability to know when you are ok, and when you really aren’t just by looking at you; we can run on coffee and fumes for hours, exponentially longer if given a slice of cake and a whiff of gratitude. Obviously, this so-called sorcery comes from experience and practice.
They used to say midwifery was a vocation, a calling. You didn’t choose it, it chose you. In the good old bad old days, society tolerated your magic, but only up to a point. It tolerated the fact that you were a (resaonably) well educated, single, childless, cat lady. With your own (very modest) income. Because it was understood that your magic was a not-for-profit gift, and the wisest women knew better than to display too much autonomy or financial independence. Society was alive to the fact you couldn’t tend to your own family while ministering to everyone else’s.  Every father-to-could see the value of a skilled birth assistant and it behoved him to keep the mother of his children alive to care for those children. Still, midwives had to toe a fine line: too much knowledge which might lead to slightly improved birth control, maybe even the odd (extremely risky, utterly desperate) termination of pregnancy, and you’d be cinders. Literally.  Not enough and your women died, and you were toast. Literally.
Of course, female literacy wasn’t a thing, so knowledge wasn’t often written, or if it was, not much has survived. Skills and knowledge were passed on from one generation to the next, from one wise woman to her apprentice with limited access to the wealth of expertise gleaned by previous generations detailing particularly effective magic, versus things that were simply superstition. We jest about ye goode olde days of yore, but we shouldn’t, because there are still plenty of places in the world today where midwifery education is rudimentary at best. Places where girls are excluded from education, where a midwife relies entirely on outdated knowledge, and can still end up as target practice for men with rocks…
But midwives don’t appear by magic. They never did. I suppose that a young girl answering a “divine calling” was granted a modicum of respectability which afforded her the freedom she needed to do her job with an expectation of safe passage. Everyone knew that babies are often born at night, so the midwife needed special dispensation to be out alone after dark. Any other lone female was, of course, asking for trouble. In spades.
Thing is, there needs to be a supply of healthy, well educated young women who can be trained to become the next generation of midwives. It really helps if these young women remain unburdened by their own maternity at least long enough to complete