A role that serves everyone at their most vulnerable moment can earn protection even from the roughest people. In a notoriously dangerous dockland district, the reverence of hard men for the midwives let those women walk alone, day or night, without fear.
Judging someone's choices from a moral platform ignores what they are choosing between. A mother whose child is dying of hunger and cold who sells her body is doing what any mother worthy of the name would do, and condemning her is a luxury of those who never faced that choice.
What people don't understand about birth, sex and death gets wrapped in mystery and magic. The fear spreads to whoever handles those moments: the women who delivered babies were mocked and even feared as witches.
As more interventions arrive (inductions, drugs, drips, surgical deliveries), a natural event gets redefined as a medical condition that needs treatment. That shift brings more anxiety around childbirth, not less.
In helping someone through an ordeal, the ability to make them trust you ranks above technique. Training, knowledge, judgment, patience and stamina all matter, but a woman in labour first needs someone who can steady her.