Paid Maternity Leave

Institutionalized Racism, White Privilege, and MANA

Oh my goodness. If you haven’t been following along, there has been a tremendous amount of activity in the last two weeks within MANA, the Midwives Alliance of North America.

Here is a rundown of what has happened so far:

1. On May 21, the Midwives of Color (MOC) MANA section chair and her Inner Council resigned en masse from their board positions within MANA and the organization itself, citing continued institutionalized racism and continued inaction on MANA’s part. The midwives who resigned are the MOC Chair Darynée Blount and the MOC Inner Council: Jennie Joseph, Jessica Roach, Ayesha Ibrahim, Claudia Booker and Michelle Peixinho. All of these are midwives and student midwives for whom I have nothing but the deepest respect and admiration. They are absolutely top midwifery leaders and activists and are at the forefront of reproductive and birth justice work in the midwifery world. MANA lost some of their best midwives when these women resigned. You can read the entire resignation letter here.
2. MANA responded on their Facebook page by trying initiate conversations about what happened and where to move forward in the future (these can be an infuriating experience to read, be forewarned). They continue to write letters to their membership and the public at large explaining their position, stating the work they have already done and where they see their next steps, and making public a sort of apology that did not take any real ownership for racism and racist practices they have perpetuated through the history of MANA. You can all of these public statements here.
3. Jessica Roach, one of the MOC Inner Council Members who resigned, wrote a response letter.
4. Wendy Gordon wrote a letter of apology. This letter addresses her own shortcomings, examines her role in perpetuating racism in midwifery, and makes a commitment to move forward and make changes in the future. It looks a lot more like the apology letter I would have liked to have seen from MANA.
5. Perez covered the resignation on the Radical Doula blog here and here. I think she really hits the nail on the head here:

   “Again, for me, the bottom line is this: we can no longer ignore the disproportionately high negative maternal and infant health outcomes faced by communities of color.
   “And it’s going to be damn hard to address those disparities if we can’t even address racism in our own organizations–especially if that racism means that providers of color choose to leave or are pushed out.

   “The needs of communities of color in maternity care can no longer be the topic of an interest group, or a caucus, or a breakout session. It has to be THE FOCUS. And my guess is that if we address the needs of communities of color, we’ll probably change maternity care in ways that benefit everyone.”

6. There have been some calls for a resignation of the entire MANA board, a radical restructuring of the power systems within the organization, and a new board with MOC members committed to institutional change. Personally, I am supportive of this proposal. I think it’s going to take radical change like this resignation and other organizational restructuring to dismantle the systems of power currently in place and rebuild an organization that actually serves all midwives, parents, and children.

Frankly, MANA’s response it is too little way too late. A lot of it looks like white guilt and lip service to me, without any real sweeping change that will effect anything substantive. Within the past year, they launched a social justice agenda, brought some anti-oppression trainers on-board, and started to offer workshops at MANA conferences. What is needed is deep, sweeping institutional change and a strong commitment to undoing the the harm caused by racism in the past and in the future. We need to re-examine our priorities as midwives and own up to our own role in the racism inherent in white-dominated midwifery as it stands today. No ifs ands or buts. Each and every white midwife needs to learn about anti-racism and anti-oppression work and commit to continuing this learning process for the rest of their tenure as a midwife. They need to examine their own role in the racist attitudes, actions, and statements perpetuated by them, their fellow midwives, and their midwifery organization. It is each white midwife’s duty to learn about white privilege and own their own shit. Not only is this imperative for the profession as a whole, it is crucial that we do this in order to serve our clients better and all birthing parents.

I think midwifery has an incredible opportunity here to really effect the racial disparities facing Black and Native American families specifically when it comes to maternal and infant mortality. Will we let the opportunity slip us by? I sincerely hope not. I am done pussy-footing around here and I am sick of forgiving ignorance and racism as par for the course when it comes to midwifery. Our clients deserve better, our students deserve better, and we ourselves deserve better. I am fed up.

I want to state for the record that although I am a student midwife, I am not a member of MANA. I was considering joining my professional organization when I had enough extra money to do so although lately I have been re-thinking things. I already knew that MANA had a serious and long-standing problematic relationship with race and racism. However, watching how MANA has dealt with the resignation and the aftermath, I am less than impressed. I don’t know that I can, in good conscience and at this time, join an organization that midwives the likes of Jennie Joseph and Michelle Peixinho feel they can no longer be a part of.

Push Girls

Have y’all heard about the series Push Girls coming out on the Sundance Channel this June about four strong female friends who also happen to have spinal cord injuries? This show looks like it is doing so much right: strong women who hold each other up instead of tear each other down, interracial friendships, actors with disabilities playing themselves (instead of the countless roles in which able-bodied and typical actors play people with disabilities a la characters like Artie in Glee or Raymond in Rain Man). Not to mention the very real, complex, and interesting lives these women lead. The series looks like it is neither focusing solely in on disability nor ignoring it but instead include it as one dynamic in a shifting

One of the things I’m most excited about is that we follow Auti Angel, one of the Push Girls, on her journey to become pregnant and start a family. We almost never see images in the media of women with disabilities choosing parenthood. We don’t see positive portrayals (or any portrayals for that matter) of women with disabilities during pregnancy, labor and birth, or the postpartum period. I’m excited to nuance this conversation, deepen it, and look at it with all of its complexities and joys. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping she chooses a midwife, but I guess we’ll have to see. Mostly, I can’t wait to see how the show producers choose to portray Push Girls and this particular story line.

Midwifery Care is Revolutionary

 

“Deciding that you’re going to have a baby with a midwife makes you a revolutionary. Just that decision alone. You have decided that you are not going to be a passive voyeur in the journey of pregnancy and of birth. That you are, as I tell my clients, deciding that you’re going to drive this car. You will invite other people to be in the car with you. Your midwife and your birth team will be sitting next to you with a map. When you decide that you’re going to have a baby with a midwife, you decide that you’re going to participate in the decisions that are made during your pregnancy.”

Inspiring and stirring words by Claudia Booker from the short film Midwives Address Health Disparities.

“It’s Not Acceptable”: Midwives Address Health Disparities

This.

“It’s not acceptable that African American women, regardless of their educational and economic background, still have a four times greater chance of dying in the childbearing year than their white counterparts… It’s not acceptable that three to four times more Native American and African American babies die than their infant white counterparts.”

This is how the incredible Geradine Simkins opens this new film in MANA’s new I Am A Midwife series. I love this short film. None of these midwives are beating around the bush here. They give you the facts and make it clear just how serious of a problem racial inequality is for maternal and infant mortality. This film features some of the most brilliant CPMs today working on reproductive justice within a midwifery context including not only Geradine Simkins, but also Katsi Cook, Claudia Booker, Umm Salaamah Abdullah-Zaimah, Tamara Taitt, and Arizona’s own Marinah Farrell. I can’t even tell you how honored I am to be joining a community of midwives that includes these women. I feel like they and other midwives and birth professionals like them have been laying and continue to lay the groundwork and foundation that will allow these crucial changes to take place and transform maternity care as we know it in this country.

To that end, I leave you with this quote by Tamara Taitt:

“I feel like health disparities is really the battle ground on which midwifery will be proven to be the gold standard.”

 

Rachel Maddow on Racial Disparities in Infant Mortality

This is a story about what happens when extreme right politics get in the way of saving lives, specifically for birthing parents and their babies. Rachel Maddow tackles the racial disparities that cause the infant mortality rate in Mississippi to be worse than that of Sri Lanka and Botswana. The national infant mortality rate is atrocious at 6.8 deaths per 1000 live births. And the rate in Mississippi is a heart-stopping 10.6 per 1000 live births. (for 2005-2007 as recorded by the CDC). Maddow interviews Dr. Carl Reddix, an OB/GYN that was just ousted from the Mississippi board of health for apparently being too pro-abortion for the new right-wing players in the government (who are apparently to the right even of Haley Barbour, the right wing anti-abortion former governor of Mississippi who appointed Dr. Reddix to the board originally).

The problem? Dr. Reddix agreed to back up a clinic that provides abortions. As in, if something goes wrong during a procedure and they have to transport to a better equipped hospital, Dr. Reddix agreed to provide care for the patient. I would have thought that even people who are staunchly pro-life would be for a very well-qualified doctor providing life-saving care to patients experiencing a complication from an abortion. We might disagree about whether abortion is ok, moral, or should be legal. Surely we don’t disagree about whether we should provide care to an adult in medical need, regardless of their choices.

 

Deep Gratitude: Or How to Precept a Midwifery Student

I cannot even tell you what deep gratitude I have for my current preceptor. For a long time, I have believed very strongly that we need to midwife our students in the same way we midwife our clients. Unfortunately, that is often not the case. I plan to look more deeply at the cycle of abuse that is tied up in so many of our stories as we move from student to midwife. But that’s beside the point right now, because this is a post of thanksgiving.

For me, midwifery has been a long journey, not only to learn the skills and knowledge of being a midwife, but of stepping into myself as the person I want to be in this world. I thought I had been doing this my whole life, this work of stepping into myself. Midwifery taught me that I had only seen the tip of the iceberg. To me, midwifery seems to be the sort of calling that is deeply transformative on every level of your life. I am deepening my understanding of myself professionally, personally, spiritually, discovering who I am as a midwife, and working hard to come into my own.

I don’t think it gets much better than this with a preceptor. She is an excellent and thoughtful teacher. She cares about me as an individual and celebrates my successes. In many ways, she sees my successes as her own – which they are in part since she had such a big hand in molding me into the midwife I am today and who I will continue to develop into. Some of the highlights:

• She initiates conversations with me when she sense I need to discuss something. Usually, before I even get the chance to ask to have the conversation. She makes communication with her easy and welcomes it. I never have to worry about whether “I’m bothering her” if I need to discuss or process something.
• She focuses on teaching me how to think as a midwife, not just the hard skills. I know that when I leave her practice, she’ll feel like I’m ready to be a practicing midwife. I don’t know that anyone graduates from their midwifery education feeling fully ready to be out on their own, but at least I’ll know that she thinks I can do it.
• She welcomes differing opinions. She lets me do things my way even if she doesn’t do it that way herself. If I learned something different in school or from a previous midwife, we look it up and discuss it.
• She does everything she can to help me reach my educational goals. I mean everything.
• She works to help clients trust and like me. If clients ask a question in an appointment, I often find her eyes on me as well, signaling subtly to the clients that I am just as competent to answer this question as she is. At births if I am acting as primary under supervision, she gives me the space to make decisions and do most of the work. Of course, she’s always there if I need her, but she works on pushing me to be my best.
• When I ask for something to change, it happens immediately. It’s impressive, honestly, to be so deeply listened to.
  • For example, shortly after I came to Arizona I expressed that it would be more helpful for me when palpating a woman’s belly to either go first or have her not tell me the position of the baby if she palpates first. That way I can learn to trust my own hands and not just get what I expect to get based on what she said. The very next appointment she made the switch and has never ever gone back.
  • After a birth that was difficult for me, she was trying to get me to process with her. I told her I’m a bit of a slow processor, and don’t always know how I feel about things fully until a day or two later (which is true). The next birth I attended with her, she checked in with me immediately afterwards. She said, “I know you’re a slow processor, but I just wanted to check to see if you had any immediate thoughts” and then indicated that we could talk about this later too.

Precepting a student is just as much of a skill, art, and calling as it is to be a midwife. I feel such deep gratitude for this woman who has welcomed me into her practice and into her life with such a big and open heart. Thank you, from the bottom of mine.

Food Blogging at Worts + Cunning

Well looky that! I just posted my first guest post as a food blogger over at the completely fabulous Worts + Cunning Apothecary. Alexis is running a fabulous series called It’s Always Tea Time Somewhere! Knowing that it’s always tea time honestly is a big part of what’s getting me through midwifery school. Look forward to other delicious treats by me and other bloggers in the future.

You may also notice that my name changed. As part of a vow I made to the Goddess on Beltaine, I have adopted the name K. Heron for a year and a day. You may call me Heron. I’ve been thinking of switching over to using my real name for awhile now, and this feels appropriate. It’s not my given name nor the name most people know me by, but I certainly consider it to be my real name.

And yes, I’m getting back into blogging for Bloody Show. My apologies that it’s been such a long time since my last post. Look for more posts soon.

Once Upon a Time in Western Washington

Hello! It’s been a long time, nice to see you here again. I realize I haven’t posted since, well, I left Austin. There are a whole lot of reasons for not the least of which were adjusting to a new state/new midwife/new clients/etc. as well as healing emotionally for the reasons I left my preceptorship in Austin so abruptly. I’m working through it all and have several posts planned to touch on those subjects.

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you a story. It is a story about a bizarre convergence of events, touching on mysterious Pagan ways and midwifery. It begins in the usual way, like so:

Once upon a time, a young baby dyke was growing up in the woods of a placed called western Washington. She made friends with a Very Tall Family. This Very Tall Family was so tall, in fact, that they did outlandish things like keep their microwave on top of the refrigerator where the shortish baby dyke could not reach without standing on a stool. The Very Tall Family loved to go backpacking, and the mother in this family talked frequently about how she used to go backpacking with her former best friend, Teddy. The baby dyke heard lots of stories about her escapades and adventures backpacking with Teddy and though she never met the woman, felt like she kind of knew her anyway.

Skip ahead a few years, and the baby dyke finds herself attending a women’s gathering called Longdance. The mother and daughter from the Very Tall Family go, and apparently Teddy used to go too. She learned all sorts of wonderful things, including songs like We Are Sisters On a Journey. She thought these are purely Pagan chants and delighted in teaching them to her circle mates in her college Pagan/Wiccan Collective.

Fast-forward several years later when the baby dyke (not such a baby dyke anymore, btw) decides to become a midwife (called to be a midwife, really, in an undeniable way. But that’s a tale for another place and another time). She travels a great distance to a far away land called Maine to attend midwifery school. There, she learns about MANA and how it was formed, and also about a woman named Teddy Charvet who was instrumental in founding the Seattle Midwifery School and was the first president of MANA. And then she had an epiphany that this Teddy Charvet was the same Teddy Charvet who used to go hiking with the mother of the Very Tall Family all those years ago (who, btw, now goes by Therese and still loves being in the forest). And she found out that We Are Sisters on a Journey is not just a Pagan song, but a beloved song for MANA as well. In fact it was sung at the very first MANA gathering brought, I like to imagine, directly to MANA by Teddy herself from the bosom of the women’s Pagan circles that later formed Longdance.

And it is in this roundabout way that I feel like I have always, somehow, had a connection to the rebirthing of midwifery in the US and the creation of MANA, although I didn’t realize it until very recently. Curious, no? It does seem strange to me that I’ve seemed to narrowly avoid meeting this woman my entire life.

More on Adoptees as Parents | Borders and Bridges

I think Lena raises some important questions here. Any thoughts?

I’ve been mulling over this topic for a while now…as a doula, I witness the birth of new families all the time. As an adoptee, I can’t help but wonder how this experience of becoming a parent might carry a different meaning for adoptees.

What is it like to become pregnant when your mother hasn’t experienced pregnancy?  What is it like to look into your child’s eyes and recognize yourself in someone else for the first time in your life?  Does becoming a parent kindle a desire to search for birthparents? How does becoming a parent change your perspective on your childhood and the way you were raised?  Does it make a difference, or not at all?

Read the rest of the blog post here More on Adoptees as Parents | Borders and Bridges.