The National Alliance for Traditional Birth Rights exists to defend informed consent and the freedom of families to choose how and where they give birth, including traditional midwifery and other community-based care consistent with their values, beliefs, and medical circumstances. For more than two centuries, traditional midwives have served American communities—Amish, Mennonite, Indigenous, Black, Appalachian, immigrant, rural, and religious—as a continuous model of maternal care, not a fringe practice. NATBR works to secure recognition of that heritage and to stop its elimination through regulatory monopoly.

Hospital consolidation, insurance dominance, and expanding licensure regimes have narrowed maternity care while maternal mortality, cesarean rates, and maternal mental health crises have continued to rise. Informed consent has been weakened by institutional protocols, liability pressure, and coercive practice. Informed refusal has been stigmatized.

Liability-driven pressure on physicians and institutions, and the legislative elimination and criminalization of traditional midwifery have narrowed those choices, weakened consent and refusal, and treated the exercise of a civil right as a criminal offense.

NATBR rejects the claim that families must surrender autonomy, religious freedom, or informed consent to institutional policy.

Through national and state outreach, public education, documentation of enforcement and consent violations, and birth freedom legislation, NATBR works to keep lawful decisions about maternity care in the hands of parents and to ensure that state and federal action does not infringe those constitutional rights.