Angela Murdaugh
Sage Femme
Sage Femme means both “wise woman”—and “midwife.” On October 19, 2008, the Midwives Alliance of North American (MANA) bestowed on Sr. Angela Murdaugh their highest honor—the Sage Femme Award, honoring not only her experience and wisdom but her deep compassion as well.
Geraldine Simkins, president of MANA, said, “Sister Angela Murdaugh is known, admired, and loved by midwives, mothers, and birth activists across the nation for her loving care of mothers and babies who are among the most underserved in this nation—our immigrant and undocumented women in the southwestern United States.”
“We did an enormously wonderful job of improving infant outcomes,” Sr. Angela said. “We had half as many preterm babies and low-weight babies as our county, as our state, or as the United States.” By making sure mothers had good pre- and postnatal care, enough to eat, and a clean, safe, caring place to deliver their babies, she made a true difference in the lives of hundreds of families in the Rio Grande Valley.
A Vision for Childbirth as Natural
For Sr. Angela, birth is a beautiful, natural event, not a clinical procedure. And she credits her decision to become a certified nurse midwife in part to Sr. Mary Charitas Iffrig, who introduced her to natural childbirth.
“With the Erna Wright method of natural childbirth, the parents sang through transition—that point from about seven centimeters to complete that is the hardest, most difficult part of labor. This mother and her husband sang ‘O What a Beautiful Morning’ through transition! It was so lovely! The mother was wide awake and everything was delightful—we stood next to each other just swooning over this wonderful experience!” It fueled her passion and vision for what childbirth could be.
Sr. Angela earned her master’s in midwifery from Columbia University. In 1971, she headed to Su Clinica Familiar in Raymondville, Texas, where she established the first free-standing birth center in Texas to provide poor mothers with good care during pregnancy and delivery. For more than eight years she helped mothers and babies through prenatal visits, labor and delivery, and postpartum visits.
For One Brief Shining Moment
After a short internship in Washington, D.C., Sr. Angela returned to Texas with a vision.
She missed the strong sense of family that was part of the culture—of women who nurtured other women through pregnancy and delivery. “It was nothing—nothing for me to have two sets of grandmothers at a birth. And sisters! Seven, eight sisters, aunts—just lots of women, with their energy and power and goodness. It was just incredible! They loved having babies. They loved being mothers. You never had any sense that these children were anything but loved and taken care of. For them, that was simply how life was supposed to be.”
With three other sisters, she founded Holy Family Birth Center in Weslaco, one of the poorest areas of the impoverished region about ten miles from the Mexican border. And she built it her way. “I wanted to live and work in the same place, to live in a simple way like my people so that the way I lived would spiritually, emotionally, and physically feed my work and my work would spiritually, emotionally, and physically feed the way I lived.”
Holy Family did not seek government funding, giving her the freedom to place crucifixes in the rooms and to make decisions that best fit the center and its deeply religious clients.
It was a great decision. “For one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot—an oasis of what midwifery should be,” Sr. Angela says. “A moment when professors sent their best, most forward students from all over the United States there. I always got the cream of the crop.” Methods were “high touch, low tech.” “It was just such a fabulous place.”
While she retired from Holy Family in 2007, she still hears from many of those students. Many treasure their time at Holy Family as a golden era. “It was such a privilege to have mentored so many people.”
A Legendary Figure
Sr. Angela’s energy, vision, and compassion have touched the lives of thousands, from the poor she treated with dignity to the students and midwives she mentored and challenged. She helped establish policies and licensing requirements for birth centers. Her advocacy gained respect and acceptance for the midwifery profession, and her striving to ensure that all people have access to quality medical care reflected her deep compassion and commitment to social justice.
She served as president of the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) and received numerous awards, including the Texas Nurse of the Year Award (1978), ACNM’s Hattie Hemschemeyer Award (1990), and the Social Justice Award (1998). She was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in September 2002, and she received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Villanova University in May 2005.
Today her ministry of compassion continues as she reaches out to those in prison, showing them the same dignity and compassion that Jesus had for the poor and broken.