Rather than tracing a linear teleology in which women, obediently following the directives of male-dominated institutions, move from the home to the hospital to have their babies, this presentation unpacks three constellations of childbirth in twentieth-century Arabia. In defiance of pressure from Christian missionaries and state doctors, local women resisted the medicalization of childbirth and persisted in giving birth at home under the care of midwives and women relatives. Childbirth makes Arabian women’s worlds visible in the face of a historiography that has overwhelmingly focused on masculinist experiences of oceanic mobility and national development.