Meet Jacinta
Jacinta Wood (she/they) is a Black, queer midwife, mother, and student of ancestral rhythm.
They move through the world with care—shaped by the body they were born into, and the stories they carry. Jacinta was born with sickle cell disease and raised in and around the medical system. From a young age, they learned what it means to be monitored but not truly seen. That early experience of being treated as a diagnosis, rather than a whole person, planted the seed for how they offer care now: slowly, deliberately, with deep listening.
Before stepping into midwifery, Jacinta worked full-time as a massage therapist, offering touch as restoration and relationship. Their hands were trained not just in technique, but in attention. That work taught them that the body holds memory, that healing is never one-size-fits-all, and that presence matters more than performance.
Their path into birth work began with their own experiences—giving birth to their daughter, and later choosing abortion. Those moments revealed just how many people navigate pregnancy and loss inside systems that rush, dismiss, or assume.
Jacinta became a doula thinking that information could be a shield. That if clients just knew more, they could protect themselves from harm. But over time, it became clear: the issue isn’t just a lack of knowledge. It’s the system itself.
Time after time, they saw how people were being failed not because they were uninformed—but because they were trying to give birth in spaces that don’t know how to love us. Systems that don’t honor rhythm, story, choice, or truth.
Midwifery met Jacinta there—at the intersection of personal story and collective harm. It wasn’t just a profession. It was a remembering. A call answered. A lineage returned to.
Honoring the Grand Midwives
Jacinta’s work is guided by the Black grand midwives—community healers who caught generations of babies in the U.S. South, whose wisdom shaped how we survive. Though many were pushed out by the state, their legacy remains in every home visit, every birth altar, every deep breath taken before touching someone’s belly.
They remind us this is not new. We’ve always had us.
Defining Sunfolk Midwifery
Sunfolk Midwifery is not just a practice. It’s a home for care that remembers. A place where families are met with slowness, reverence, and room to unfold.
This is care that resists urgency. Care that honors intuition. Care that believes you are not too much, too complicated, or too late.
“One of the darkest moments in US history was the systematic eradication of the African American midwife from her community, resulting in a legacy of birth injustices.”
— Shafia M. Monroe
Land Acknowledgment
Sunfolk Midwifery is based on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Southern Paiute people, known as Nuwuvi.
I honor the Nuwuvi as the original stewards of this land—land that holds memory, ceremony, and care that long predates colonial borders. The violence of settler occupation continues to shape how land, birth, and bodies are regulated today.
This acknowledgment is not a substitute for reparative action. It is a starting point—a call to be in the right relationship with the land and the Indigenous people who still live, love, and organize here.
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