Our story
Old wisdom. New tools.
Midwifery is the oldest profession in American medicine, carried for centuries by women whose names rarely made the record. SageWife exists so the midwives carrying it today can build practices that last.
Salvia, from the Latin salvere: to heal, to be well
Our palette comes from the plant itself: the silver-green leaf, the violet blossom, late-summer honey gold, and the dark earth it grows from.
Why "SageWife"
A wise plant, and the oldest job title on earth
Sage is the healer's herb, planted by generations of mothers and grandmothers, brewed for teas and tinctures, shorthand in every language for wisdom earned over time.
Wife comes from midwife, Old English for "with woman." Not above, not instead of. With.
SageWife is the wise companion standing with the midwife the way the midwife stands with the mother: steady, prepared, and never the center of attention.
The lineage we serve
Four hundred years of "with woman"
You can't build honestly for midwives without knowing whose shoulders the profession stands on.
Long before 1600
The first midwives of these lands
Indigenous midwives tend birth across this continent for countless generations, with plant medicine, ceremony, and community, long before anyone else arrives.
1619 – 1800s
A lineage survives the crossing
African midwives' knowledge survives the Middle Passage. Enslaved and later free Black midwives catch generations of American babies, Black and white alike, across the South.
Early 1900s
The granny midwives
In much of the rural South, 'granny midwives' attend most births, walking miles between homes, paid in eggs and gratitude. Women like Onnie Lee Logan and Margaret Charles Smith carry whole counties on their knowledge.
1920s – 1950s
Pushed to the margins
Birth moves to hospitals, and licensing campaigns, often openly hostile, push traditional midwives out of practice. Midwife-attended birth falls to a few percent of American babies.
1970s – today
The renaissance
CNMs, CPMs, and birth centers rebuild community birth. A new generation of midwives from every background, with Black midwives among its leading voices, reclaims the tradition amid a maternal health crisis that needs it urgently.
Now
Our small part
SageWife builds the quiet software underneath: branded portals, scheduling, payments, and follow-up, so independent midwives can run sustainable practices under their own names.
Mission
Keep independent midwifery independent
Every midwife who wants her own practice should be able to run one, without a web developer, a billing service, and a stack of subscriptions duct-taped together. One platform, her name on every screen of it.
The midwife is the brand
Your families should know your name, not ours. We measure our success by how invisible we are in your clients' birth stories.
With woman, always
Midwife means 'with woman.' Technology here serves the relationship: more time at bedsides, less at desks. It never replaces the hands.
Honor the lineage
We build with reverence for the midwives who kept this tradition alive, and with accountability to the communities still underserved by American maternity care.
Advisors
The midwives who keep us honest
We do not get to decide what a midwifery practice needs. The people who run them do.
Amariee Collins
Founding Advisor
Amariee Collins advises SageWife on the part of midwifery that software usually gets wrong: the business underneath the care. She joined as our founding advisor to make sure the platform is built around how independent practices actually earn a living, not around how a software company imagines they do.
Her guidance reshaped the product in ways you can see on this site. She is the reason the EMR is the base of every plan rather than the upsell, the reason prenatal, birth, and postpartum are the three templates every practice starts with while everything else stays customizable to a midwife's license and state, and the reason we began preparing the chart for the 2027 retirement of the global obstetric billing codes well ahead of the deadline.
She keeps returning us to the same question: does this help a midwife run a practice that is still solvent next year?
Built hand-in-hand with practicing midwives
Every workflow in SageWife (enrollment, billing by phase of care, follow-up sequences, the assistant's guardrails) was shaped by midwives running real caseloads. If something feels like it was designed by a software company instead of a midwife, tell us and we'll fix it.