While widely regarded as a victory of grassroots feminist organizing and as part of the ongoing struggle for gender equity and female reproductive autonomy, the movement to legalize midwifery in Ontario has, in fact, derived considerable benefit from hierarchical rather than equal relations among women. This article describes the practice of “midwifery tourism” whereby Ontario midwives traveled to “Third World” maternity clinics in order to obtain clinical experience unavailable to them in the period that preceded the legalization of the profession in the province. Many traveled in order to garner the requisite number of births for participation in provincial programs designed to integrate practicing midwives into the health care system. In addition to this very quantifiable benefit, midwives were also able to enhance their professional prominence through a claim to first-hand knowledge of the birth practices of “Third World” women, a group mythologized within natural childbirth discourse as possessing innate feminine birthing knowledge as yet uncorrupted by Western medical practices. The re-emergence of midwifery in North America provides a cogent example of how, through epistemological claims about women's shared identity, “Third World” space, and those who occupy it, come to constitute a commodity for first world women's consumption and social advancement.