My Substack is now all about my book, Desert Birthright

June 28, 2025

Irhave realized what I’m writing about on Substack may be a bit confusing for many of you. I was writing all about my cancer journey, but now I’m shifting gears and using Substack as a place to write about my memoir, Desert Birthright, which is due to be released in October! Published by The University of Utah Press, this is something I’ve been working on for over ten years and is now coming to fruition. uofupress.com

Here’s the summary of the book:

Desert Birthright

A Midwife’s Memoir

Lori Wrankle

The coming-of-age memoir of a homebirth midwife in the Southwest

Lori Wrankle was sixteen when she helped deliver her first baby.

“I witnessed the entire universe unfold at my feet,” she writes

in Desert Birthright. Later, working as a hospital doula,

Wrankle observed firsthand the suffering inflicted upon birthing

women by male-dominated Western childbirth practices, from

casual racism to unnecessary and nonconsensual procedures,

including the dreaded “husband stitch.” After a traumatic labor

and delivery of her own, she decided to take back woman-centered

childbirth and start a homebirth midwifery practice.

Desert Birthright traverses twenty-five years of midwifery,

often in fundamentalist polygamist circles, weaving together

birth stories with childhood memories as Wrankle grapples with

her shifting Mormon faith. Her poetic voice shines—a placenta

becomes the tree of life, the folds in a baby’s arm layers of

sand in the desert. Desert Birthright is a deeply personal story

of life, death, and modern womanhood in the rural Southwest, and

of one midwife’s journey of faith, self-discovery, and

liberation in the face of adversity.

Lori Wrankle is a lay midwife with twenty-five years of

experience. She has delivered hundreds of babies, primarily

serving Mormon women of southern Utah and northern Arizona.

“Desert Birthright is more than a memoir—it is a hymn to the

resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of

faith. In the end, it is not just a story of birth, but of

rebirth—a testament to the enduring power of women who labor and

rise anew.”— Lindsay Hansen Park, executive director, Sunstone

Education Foundation

“An interesting peek into the world of polygamy and its

workings. With pleasure and fascination, you can explore the

yellow brick road into this realm.”—Phyllis Barber, author of

The Precarious Walk