Women of Valor begins with midwife Olivia Allen (Lynn Hamilton) being approached by a neighbor asking her to help a pregnant woman in a difficult labor at home. Olivia initially refuses because she has never seen the pregnant woman before, but when she finds out that she is an undocumented immigrant who refuses to go to the hospital, she relents and assists in the delivery. When the baby is delivered, there are complications and they are rushed to the hospital anyway where the newborn dies. The treating physician is furious over this and blames Olivia without having all of the facts which leads to charges being filed against her. At the request of another doctor that knows Olivia, Quincy (Jack Klugman) conducts another autopsy of the newborn in the hopes of being able to exonerate Olivia while there is a debate over whether unlicensed midwives truly help or are harmful.
While we do see Quincy performing an autopsy in this story and there are several scenes that take place in the coroner lab, really the issue of unlicensed midwives is in the spotlight here and everything else is secondary. There is no crime or mystery whatsoever as we see what happened in the opening scenes, so this episode becomes a sounding board advocating for natural childbirths and protecting those that support this practice. It makes for a rather dull episode and given that we have already seen many episodes in the Quincy series that deal with quality of care type issues, it is not very original either.
Overall this is a pretty below average late Season 8 episode where we do get to see Quincy doing what he does best in the coroner lab but the plot doesn't have very much going for it and will likely leave you feeling a little bored while watching.