Judy Luce, BA, MA, LM, has been a homebirth community midwife for thirty-three years, first as a lay midwife, then as a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) since 1994, and Licensed Midwife in Vermont since 2000 and California since 2006. She learned birth from birth -- her own and the births of other women – and she learned in community with other women who desired to help women to birth at home.

She lived nine years in a women’s religious community where the spirituality that guides her midwifery was born. Her initiation into feminism came through the transformative experiences of her three births, the last one at home. Her midwifery was also born through these experiences.

Judy has been a childbirth activist and educator as well as a woman's health activist for over three decades, inspired and mentored by members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective (Our Bodies Ourselves) in the early 1970s. Her passion for women and birth led her to speak at universities, high schools, medical schools, and senior citizen coffee klatches about the power of giving birth at home and the ways the medical care system failed to meet the needs of women. She also was a member of a feminist writer’s group, the “Judith Collective.” She cut her political teeth organizing against the regionalization of maternity services and for free standing birth centers, both failed efforts at the time. She was an invited participant to the National Science Foundation EIRTAW conference (Ethical Issues in Reproductive Technology: An Assessment by Women), whose challenge to medical practice still stands. She was a contributing author to the “Childbirth" chapter in several editions of Our Bodies Ourselves, and in the mid-1980s authored the chapter on the "Politics of Women's Health." While working with the Family Practice Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts she contributed to the text: Home Birth: A Practioner’s Guide to Birth Outside the Hospital.

In the 1990s Judy was a member of the Women’s Institute for Childbearing Policy that produced the still relevant document, “Childbearing Policy Within a National Health Program: An Evolving Consensus for New Directions.” In Vermont she played a central role in the passage of licensing legislation in 2000. In 2001 she completed her Master's degree in Cultural Studies and Midwifery with her thesis: Midwives at the Margins of Life: Home Birth and Home Dying. In this work she developed the concept of midwives primarily as cultural workers, an idea that is central to her midwifery practice and critique of the medicalization of birth. Judy served as MANA regional representative, helped create MANA’s Ethics and Values Statement, presently serves on the Document Review Committee, and is a member of the California Association of Midwives and the Bay Area Home Birth Collective.

In 1999, at the invitation of a Mayan refugee family in VT, Judy traveled to Guatemala to meet with a community of Mam speaking midwives in the western highland town of Concepcion Chiquirichapa. Out of this meeting grew the Guatemalan Midwifery Project with its focus on promoting midwifery and protecting the health of mothers and mother earth. In 2004, after intense fundraising and bridge building between north American midwives and their supporters and the co-madronas, Judy attended the dedication of Casa Maternal de Nacimiento, owned and run by Mayan midwives, – a birth home, midwifery education center, community space, and clinic. She continues to work with this project.

Judy is the mother of three adult children. She attended the homebirths of her three granddaughters, Ava Lilah, Corinna May, and Sadie Rose. Her mentor, Norma Swenson, describes Judy as “the best philosopher of birth I know, who has the ability to see things whole and to focus always on the meanings of what we say and do."