On my very first day of midwifery school, the director of my program said something that I will never forget. She said, "Above everything else, as a midwife, you are the guardian of safety."

Since then, I have woven the notion of guarding safety into every aspect of my midwifery practice: how I care for clients and their sweet babies, how I make decisions during a birth, how I write about birth.

I have also learned that a significant part of my work as a midwife is guarding how we talk about birth. Because words are deeply powerful—and there are a lot of words we use in medicine, particularly in obstetrics, that are unhelpful at best and harmful at worst: "geriatric pregnancy," "failure to progress," "incompetent cervix" and so many others.