What is at political stake in birth? Control over birth is control over population, but birth is also the moment a person is constituted, when he becomes a political, legal, and social being. No wonder then that the efforts by the republic of France to govern and colonize the Islamic sultanate of Morocco (1912-1956) should ultimately become a battle over Muslim birth itself. The social history of French PMI (Protection Maternel et Infantile) programs in Morocco shows how medicine negotiates the line between the biological and the social. Traditional Muslim midwives mediated between Galenic, Islamic, and biomedical knowledge, a medical authority that Islamic law courts, state institutions, and physicians of the "high" philosophical medical tradition recognized. In the early protectorate period, Moroccan women enjoyed superior medical authority to French doctors--women diagnosed sickness, selected healers, prepared remedies, delivered babies, and provided medical testimony to Islamic law courts. To access the secluded Muslim woman, French medicine was first obliged to change genders and recruit French women to act as its medical intermediaries. The pioneer in Muslim women’s health, Dr. Francoise Legey, created the first maternity clinic for native women in 1927. When the French Protectorate state finally created maternal and infant health programs (PMI) for Moroccans on any scale (1948), it was to prevent nationalist revolution. Sociologist Robert Montagne argued that the Muslim patriarchal family was disintegrating and France could avoid revolution by acting as father to the new Muslim proletariat. The French extended the colonial welfare state to destroy the Muslim “mentalité;” a French-trained “muwallida” would replace the irrational "qabla" and refashion Moroccans into rational workers ready for colonial industries. But medicine has its own logics that operate beyond state ideology; practitioners and forms of knowledge have endured the rise and fall of colonial regimes. And a clinical epidemiology of birth allowed the reproductive Muslim body to speak--food for thought as the polities of North Africa and Egypt are publicly renegotiated through women's bodies in the contemporary Arab revolutions. The sources for this research are Islamic medical manuscripts, interviews conducted in Morocco 1998-2000 with midwives, physicians, nurses, and patients, French colonial archives, French medical journals, French medical monographs, and colonial medical ethnography.