A Seed’s Roots
A seed’s roots ground it to the earth and draw up nutrients. They are a nourishing umbilical cord that fuel its transformation from seed to plant. The roots of birth justice—abstract, but foundational concepts—similarly ground us and nurture us through metamorphosis and growth.
In this tour beneath the surface, we encourage you to linger as we dig deep into where birth justice flows from, how we channel it, and why. Our ancestors’ presence is potent here; move in reverence and contemplation.
Spiritual Grounding
Exactly what causes a seed to germinate remains a mystery. While water can be a catalyst and certain conditions make germination more or less likely, its occurrence is not always predictable. Try as we might to coax a seed into bringing forth life, ultimately this explosion of energy is out of our hands, at the whim of decisions made beyond our reach.
What possesses us to come to life, to respond to the call of this work? In birth justice, we often hear stories with the same key ingredient: an unseen force urging us to activate. While not all of us feel it, and it can manifest in a variety of ways, for some of us it is the driving force that dictates our path. It is a deep sense of motivation and purpose tied to a higher power or a sense of something beyond ourselves.
Connecting to a spiritual force often guides us in our professional choices and how we go about our work. Many of us feel like our roles choose us, not the other way around, and this calling can provide inspiration to keep going, even when the work is hard and we are weary. Some of us have been given a vision or a mandate to bring into the world, almost spiritual permission to
create something radical and healing. It can also be a practice of rituals passed on through tradition, where reconnecting with that lineage has personal, political, communal, and spiritual meaning.
We also recognize that the families we support and care for may have their own spiritual and communal rituals and practices, and that to authentically care for them during the perinatal period includes caring for these parts of them and their communities. The spiritual dimension of the birth process acknowledges that pregnancy, birth, and parenting are life-changing events. They have profound implications for our wellbeing throughout the life course, and for the health and strength of our families and communities. In contrast with healthcare institutions, medical schools, and public health perspectives that frame birth as a stressful and dangerous event that must be carefully managed and contained, we often describe birth as a ceremony, one that has the potential to transform the deeper meaning and life’s purpose of the parent, and that of the birthing team.
Complexity
Seeds bring forth life in a complex environment, reliant upon the interconnectedness of an array of ecological processes. The full story behind a seed’s floundering or flourishing lies not just in its ability to put out roots and shoots and photosynthesize, but also in its environmental conditions, like composition of soil and availability of clean water, which in turn are dictated by larger planetary processes like erosion and the hydrologic cycle. Seeing this bigger picture and acknowledging this complexity necessitates an understanding that there is far from one thing that gives rise to a thriving plant.
Likewise, birth takes place within a complex environment of history, policy, economics, colonialism, racism, anti-Black racism, land ownership, incarceration—all the structures and characteristics of our society. Therefore, cultivating the right environment for healthy birth, parents, and babies means addressing all of these intricacies, because there isn’t one thing that can guarantee thriving families within this complex context.
Some healthcare systems, business models, and cultural practices attempt to flatten that complexity, treating it like a crisis that needs to be managed or neutralized. This flattening often leads to a disconnect between the care a person receives and what they actually need. In birth justice, by contrast, reckoning with this complexity is a core part of the work and even what draws many of us to the field. We see it in the way that the process of pregnancy is experienced in the body (by the pregnant person, by the care provider, by the person being birthed,
and by the family), and the way that process extends across time and straddles life and death, as well as joy and pain. This complexity is honored. We make space for it and work to repair disconnect by working in and with complexity.
This practice of holding complexity is a natural result of how community-based midwifery, and community-based doula care, acknowledge how birth occurs on a spectrum of healing and trauma. We understand that beyond the mechanics of delivering care, our work must also address the layers of injustice that are carried in the pregnant body. We owe this practice to the history of reproductive justice, which arises from Black feminism, as well as the work of many artists, activists, poets, and healers who have forged pathways through the complexity of having a body while being in the body politic. Interestingly, it also stems from and explains the fact that so many of us arrive at birth justice from other social movements. Having fought for many different types of justice—racial, economic, gender, or otherwise, we understand how pregnancy and birth are impacted by the overlapping legacies of injustice in the U.S.
It is this understanding of the bigger picture, that in order to heal one system or issue we must heal other layers, that necessitates birth justice’s reach from direct service all the way to systems change. It is what immediately launches us from the goal of improving birth outcomes for individuals in our communities to taking on the entire system that determines health outcomes.
Lineage
As a seed’s roots wend their way downward, anchoring it in place, understanding the lineage of birth justice calls for us to also look skyward, to the branches of a fully fledged tree: a family tree. At the center, ensconced lovingly within the tree’s trunk, sits the birthing person. At every moment in birth work, this birthing person is held central. But each of these moments, each of these birthing people, are connected to all others, as the branches of the family tree spread wide, stretching across space and time. These branches bear the weight of history. They span generations of birthing people and birth workers. They reach outwards to touch and intertwine with the appendages of other trees, kindred social movements. They connect us to everyone who has come before and all those who will come after. They put us in constant conversation with the unfolding history of birth work, the systems that have harmed us, and the resilience that has sustained us.
We call on our activist predecessors and contemporaries to form the foundations upon which we build our work and push our work further.
We call on our movement elders to help us interpret our history, both recent and further away in time.
We call on our movement leaders to teach us, and for a tender hand-off of the baton.
We call on our ancestors to guide and support us, but also to heal.
Embodiment
From the tiniest orchid seeds, no larger than a speck of dust, to the heft of the double coconut, weighing up to 50 pounds, seeds hold within them millions of years of evolution and adaptation. They are poised, ready to spring into a specific and time-bound version of life, and continue that march of knowledge gained. Seeds bridge the past, present, and future; ancestral wisdom, the current iteration of life, and future discoveries.
We understand ourselves as part of this procession, our bodies receiving from our ancestors and offering to our descendants. We see in our work how the physical labor of the birthing person, the person being born, and the birth workers are all linked together through our bodies and how history, family, community, and our sense of self flow from and with the body.
As such, the experience of pregnancy holds more than the seemingly straightforward acts of conception, gestation, and delivery. We know that systemic oppression and injustice are mapped onto and fought on the battleground of our bodies, especially for those of us who are Indigenous, Black, queer, disabled, or otherwise marginalized. Many of our bodies are also imprinted with the physical and sexual violence that has plagued our communities. So while our bodies, in the work of birthing,
are beautiful landscapes of our resilience, they are also sites of great pain. Rather than avoiding or denying the reality of pain as it occurs alongside birth, we meet it with the utmost care. We help each other hold and metabolize that pain, and we fight like hell to fend off that which is violently induced.
Meeting the joyful potential of labor pain with care and healing is an act of resistance. Birth justice is about reframing what is deemed as painful, uncertain, and potentially mortal into an act of power, exuberant autonomy, and intergenerational healing. The revolutionary act of giving birth from a position of sovereignty and self-determination interrupts trauma’s march through time. Within the assertion of our power over our own bodies lies the potential to heal centuries of injustice.
We are able to reframe our pain and assert our power when we are in community and surrounded by those we trust, those who listen to us, those who help lift us up. This is why birth justice work centers around community: it is in community that our bodies can open to and be held through transformative pain.