Commentary
I was sitting at a banquet table at the Weston A. Price Wise Traditions conference with Dr. Naomi Whittaker, an OB/GYN from Pennsylvania.
Around us were more than 1,000 Americans, including more than 100 Amish men and women. Amos Miller and his family were among them.
Whittaker was telling me about changes to Pennsylvania’s midwifery laws that could threaten traditional birth attendants, including those serving Amish families. As she explained what had happened, I wondered whether this was another attack on a way of life that has managed to exist, at least partially, outside the systems the rest of America has embraced.
And then another thought occurred to me. The Amish are one of the United States’ most important control groups.
For generations, Americans have participated in an enormous experiment. We have changed how we eat, give birth, educate our children, and treat illness.
We’ve replaced traditional foods with industrially processed products, moved childbirth almost entirely into hospitals, expanded pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination schedules, and increasingly surrendered responsibility for our health to institutions.
And how is that experiment going?
Chronic disease, obesity, allergies, and autoimmune conditions have become familiar features of American life.
Meanwhile, many Amish families continue living differently. They eat traditional foods, do physical work, maintain multigenerational communities, and often grow their own food. Home birth remains common in some communities, and vaccination practices differ from those in mainstream America.
Researchers have already found fascinating differences.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine examined Amish and Hutterite farm children, populations with similar European ancestry but different agricultural practices. Asthma affected approximately 5 percent of Amish children compared with 21 percent of Hutterite children. Allergic sensitization was also dramatically lower among the Amish.
A preliminary autism study presented in 2010 estimated approximately one case in 271 Amish children, compared with a national estimate of one in 91 at the time. The study had limitations, so those numbers aren’t definitive.
But shouldn’t we want to investigate these differences?
I don’t believe the Amish are perfect. I’ve criticized communities that reject certain technologies and modern medical interventions while still using glyphosate and other agricultural chemicals in their farming.
At an Acres U.S.A. conference, I met an Amish man named Joseph who told me he moved his family to Maine, leaving his community, because his daughter had a severe reaction to Roundup. I’ve also watched processed ingredients, including corn syrup, enter some Amish communities.
Their practices vary, and they make decisions that can be beneficial or harmful, just like the rest of us.
But they’ve maintained something increasingly rare: the ability to live substantially differently from the dominant culture. And they deserve that freedom whether or not their choices provide useful scientific comparisons.
The Midwifery Law People Didn’t Know They Were Repealing
In May, Pennsylvania passed legislation creating a new licensing pathway for certified midwives. The law specifically stated that it neither authorized nor prohibited traditional lay midwives.
Then, in July, traditional midwives and an Amish father filed a lawsuit seeking clarification of their rights under a statute dating to 1929.
Ten days later, Pennsylvania repealed that statute.
The repeal wasn’t debated as a stand-alone midwifery bill. It was included in a massive budget-related legislative package.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania state Rep. Dave Zimmerman, a Republican, acknowledged that he hadn’t realized he was voting to repeal the law. The newspaper also reported that Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration had requested the repeal, although his office declined to comment.
I find that sequence suspicious.
The state maintains that traditional midwives can continue practicing, and home birth remains legal. But the repeal removed a long-standing statutory framework, leaving questions about how Pennsylvania’s licensing laws apply to traditional birth attendants.
One midwife interviewed by the newspaper reported attending approximately 1,600 births over 38 years. Another had attended about 600.
These women may not have medical degrees, but they have extensive practical experience.
When Saving a Mother’s Life Becomes a Licensing Question
Pennsylvania House Bill 2520 would explicitly prohibit unlicensed lay midwives from administering prescription medications during their practice, without creating an exception for life-threatening postpartum hemorrhage.
Whittaker wrote an Oct. 5 opinion piece explaining why she believes this could endanger mothers.
The medication at issue is misoprostol, also known as Cytotec, which can help control severe bleeding after childbirth.
We allow ordinary citizens to administer Narcan to someone experiencing an opioid overdose. We teach CPR and the use of defibrillators because emergencies don’t wait for licensed professionals.
Why shouldn’t an experienced traditional midwife receive training and authorization to administer a lifesaving medication when a mother is hemorrhaging?
According to Whittaker, 23 Pennsylvania counties have no hospital offering childbirth services. Some women live 40 minutes or more from a delivery room.
A mother experiencing severe postpartum bleeding may not have 40 minutes.
New York: $118,000 in Fines for Amish Schools
Pennsylvania isn’t the only state where Amish families are fighting to preserve their traditions.
In 2019, New York eliminated religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements, including for private religious schools.
Three Amish community schools were subsequently fined a combined $118,000 for allowing children to attend without the required vaccination documentation.
Under New York’s enforcement policy, each day an unvaccinated child attends school can count as a separate violation, carrying a penalty of up to $2,000.
The Amish challenged the law, arguing that it violated their religious freedom and threatened their ability to educate their children within their communities. In June this year, a federal appeals court again ruled against them.
These families weren’t demanding that public schools accommodate their beliefs. They had established their own schools, yet even that separation didn’t exempt them from the state’s requirements.
Whatever one believes about vaccination, shouldn’t Americans be concerned when maintaining a separate religious educational system can result in six-figure penalties?
Independence Over Comfort
I spend much of my time in a freedom-minded community where people talk about exiting systems, building parallel economies, growing their own food, and becoming less dependent on government institutions. We’re hosting a festival called Exit and Build at Sovereignty Ranch on Nov. 5.
But while many of us are talking about exiting the system, the Amish have been doing it for generations.
They’ve chosen independence over convenience and, often, comfort. They’ve maintained their schools, agricultural traditions, family networks, and ways of caring for one another.
At the same Weston A. Price conference, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told a story that illustrated this philosophy.
He explained that he’d planted different varieties of peach trees so he’d have peaches ripening throughout the summer to trade with an Amish farmer for raw milk. The farmer preferred his peaches to fiat currency.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Massie asked whether the farmer’s family had received the government’s stimulus checks.
They had.
What did they do with them?
They burned them.
When Massie asked why, the farmer explained that once you start accepting the government’s money, eventually you have to go to war.
Hearing Massie tell that story helped me understand why, sitting in the ballroom with Whittaker, I was beginning to see Pennsylvania’s midwifery legislation as part of a much larger question about Amish independence.
The farmer understood something many Americans have forgotten: Dependence comes with obligations, even when those obligations aren’t immediately apparent.
I’ve spent years arguing that freedom requires sacrifice. We cannot demand independence while remaining completely dependent on the institutions we claim to oppose.
The Amish have been making those sacrifices for generations.
They’ve faced conflicts over raw dairy, traditional food production, vaccination choices, and now, traditional midwifery. Each intervention has its own justification: food safety, public health, professional licensing, consumer protection.
I cannot prove these separate actions are part of a coordinated campaign against the Amish. But I can question their cumulative effect.
The Amish aren’t here simply to prove a scientific point. They’re families with the same right to make decisions about their lives that every American should possess.
Their differences also give us an opportunity to examine our assumptions about health, food, medicine, and community.
If we pressure everyone into the same systems, eventually there will be nobody left living differently enough to help us understand whether those systems are working.
Perhaps the most important lesson the Amish offer isn’t medical or agricultural at all.
It’s that freedom has a price, and that price is often convenience.
We spend a great deal of time talking about freedom in America. The Amish have spent generations making sacrifices to preserve theirs.
Maybe instead of continually finding new ways to regulate their choices, we should ask ourselves whether we’re willing to make the sacrifices necessary to preserve our own.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
