Seeding Liberation
Among the many interpretations of what birth justice is according to those working within it [Definitions of Birth Justice], if we think of birth justice as a path to liberation, we can see it as connected to a history of struggles for liberation. This tree of branching paths offers lessons we can learn, such that we may take up where our ancestors left off.
What can we learn?
Recognizing that each of us has chosen a different path for realizing birth justice—our own form of resistance in the face of oppression—we embrace this cornucopia of strategies. We win by taking every path.
In this section, we share the strategies and tactics that the birth justice actors we spoke to are mobilizing to achieve liberation.
A playbook for our work:
We hope that this playbook allows each of us to better understand the strategies we’re already using; identify those we can adopt or support; and, most of all, see how our strategies fit together. Together, we form a robust web of biodiversity that is necessary for the strength and success of our movement.
We wield power and protection through biodiversity
Biodiversity reminds us that everyone has their role to play. Some of us, as vegetable and fruit-bearing plants, may produce food to eat. Others, as trees, may provide a habitat or shade. Colorful flowers, which attract bees to encourage pollination, are also cherished for simply sparking joy and delight.
Biodiversity also provides ecosystem stability, even protecting ecosystems from collapse. To be homogeneous is to be susceptible to one fatal blow. Greater variability, a broader range of adaptations that might withstand ecosystem attacks like weather disturbances, disease, and climate change, is what allows for ecosystem survival.
As such, in our movement, biodiversity makes us responsive, adaptable, and resilient. A diversity of approaches allows us to meet the diversity of needs of our communities. One-size-fits-all simply won’t do; obstetrics has illustrated this point. We can and should lean into our different ways of working so that we can address the harms inflicted by a system that recognizes only one way of birthing and being, while also dismantling that system and implementing alternatives. As we fight against powerful structures, we can wield the power and protection in our diversity.
Find yourself in the web of interconnection
Melissa Cheyney eases us into this idea with a variation on a public health parable: “There are all these babies floating down the river, and midwives are jumping in and pulling the babies out of the river and resuscitating them. There are more babies coming than these midwives can handle, so one of the midwives starts to run away upriver, and another midwife asks, ‘Where are you going?’ The first midwife says, ‘I'm going to go see who's throwing the babies in the river!’ So you have to stop throwing the babies in the river, but the ones that are already in the river need to be pulled out. And that's the problem—you cannot function only upstream or only downstream.”
It is clear from our research that some of us work upstream, some downstream. Some of us work within systems, some negotiate with them, some hold them accountable. Others operate entirely outside, in spaces of their own creation. Oftentimes, we do each of these things at different times in our lives [Who We Are + What We Do].
As you dive into these strategies, we challenge you to locate your own among them (and let us know what we’re missing!), learn from others, and see yourself as an interconnected node in this web of biodiversity.
Choosing our leaders and accomplices wisely
Substrategies:
Uplifting those closest to the problem as our leaders
Partnering with those in alignment with the movement
Who we choose to listen to matters. Who we choose to amplify matters. Who we choose to follow matters. The fact that we have not listened to, amplified, or followed Black women speaks to the ways anti-Blackness and racism have shaped how we arrived in this moment: a perinatal health crisis that disproportionately impacts Black birthing people within an anti-Black, racist, classist healthcare model.
The idea of looking to the leadership of those most impacted by a problem in order to solve it is common among social movements. For birth justice, for which a core tenet is trust in birthing people’s knowledge of what they need, a growing number of us understand that this idea is absolutely critical to our success. Though this country’s horrific outcomes and high maternal mortality rates spare no one, Black women and birthing people are on the front line of bearing this assault. This is why we take our cues from Black birthing people and birth workers—those most intimately familiar with the problem are those with the most insightful dreams for how things could be different and those fighting most valiantly for change because their own lives and that of their communities depend on it. This is why we uplift Indigenous leaders, leaders of color, queer leaders, all those from marginalized communities. The experience of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness gives Indigenous and Black birthing people and birth workers an expertise that must be uplifted to ensure that liberation, for everyone, is embedded in our solutions and visions. So, to lead the way, we turn to the words of Indigenous and Black women thinkers and revolutionaries, champion and follow Indigenous and Black-led organizations, build the capacity of Indigenous and Black birthing people and birth workers to amplify their own voices, and center community in our work.
Shifting power requires proactively disentangling from white supremacy and ceding and leveraging our power. We do this by passing the mic to those who haven’t had it but have vital wisdom to share, and by becoming better listeners, supporters, and accomplices.
Substrategy:
Uplifting those closest to the problem as our leaders
Substrategy:
Partnering with those in alignment with the movement
As birth justice has gained attention (and resources), many newcomers have jumped into birth justice work without a real understanding of what birth justice is nor a genuine commitment to its values and goals. When would-be birth justice actors fail to examine their own investment in, benefit from, and embodiment of white supremacy, they create harm and rupture in our movement spaces, cloaked in a well-intentioned attempt to work together. This diverts our time, energy, and care away from our birth justice community and the communities we serve and draws resources away from birth justice solutions.
In order to prevent this harm, resource drain, and co-optation of the movement in service of white supremacy, we are intentional, smart, and decisive about who we work with. This discernment comes largely from the wisdom and experience we have gained over time. We hope that this landscape analysis, in its clarification of birth justice’s values and goals, will help newcomers looking to enter the movement understand the field and find their place in it, help birth justice actors more quickly identify who not to work with, and help potential accomplices understand how their work aligns with or supports birth justice (or not).
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Uplift Community Voices, Lived Experience
“My goal is to give Black women and birthing people the mic, because they have the solutions. Because I have a PhD after my name now, there will likely be a point in time when I’m seen as the expert, whether I experience birth or not, so… [I’m concerned with] how to make sure I’m moving forward in an ethical way, in a supportive way, in a way that actually translates what the people that I serve actually want me to say and how I make sure I do that strategically. I want to work with the community first… uplift their words first and their narratives first.”
—Dorian S. Odems
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No More Business as Usual
"[People entering this work] don't know the history of our region, what was happening before I got here, what happened once I got here, and what happened once I opened the door for resources to come into the community, and how white-led entities started to chase that. At this point, the white saviorism is so thick, and they know they need Black bodies to get Black money. They're bringing in Black people—and we're glad that Black people are being employed—but again, they're bringing in these Black people under the cloak [of white saviorism] and they're using them as instruments and puppets to obtain things. I've chosen not to work with some of these white entities. We can't keep doing business as usual. White philanthropy and white saviorism are tearing our community apart, and as long as I stay silent, just keep doing my work, and saying I'm going to let them figure it out, the longer I would be playing in the pool of letting white supremacy lead."
—Okunsola M. Amadou
Building, nurturing, and sustaining the birth justice community
Substrategies:
Working together
Holding each other in both work and rest
Passing on our knowledge and wisdom
Substrategy:
Working together
Across the birth justice landscape, we are channeling the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. While the moniker is passed down from the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy), Indigenous peoples across North America have planted this triad of mutual support for millennia. Corn offers its tall stalk for beans to climb, which in turn provide stability against the wind. Beans capture nutrients in the soil for all to take up through their roots. Squash blankets the ground in vines, holding moisture in the soil and warding off critters looking for their next meal.
Much like the Three Sisters, as companion plants, we work together. We pool our resources, move in concert, and amplify each other’s voices. Though our cooperation isn’t always seamless, our survey results found that 70% of participants do their work in collaboration with others, as part of supportive relationships and more formal alliances and networks.
Just a few examples of our collaborations are organizing co-sponsored and co-facilitated events, building policy advocacy coalitions, opening birth centers that offer wraparound services, and sharing insights and developing our collective mission at conferences and summits. When done right, working together provides space for us to build community, be our authentic selves, share bold visions for a better world, recognize our collective power, and deepen our understanding of the issues we face and the liberatory framework birth justice offers for addressing them. Working together, we achieve more than we could on our own.
Substrategy:
Holding each other in both work and rest
This work is hard, and relentless. So many of us are struggling to stave off burnout, or are long past burnt [Burnout & Moral Injury]. So how do we keep going? How do we manage to stay in this work and continue chipping away at our goals? As often as burnout came up in our research, we also heard about one essential antidote: community.
We maintain the work in the long run by supporting each other. We support each other in taking breaks, reassuring others that the work will still be here when they’re ready to come back and that we will still be here while they rest. We support each other in pivoting to different strategies and moving across the lanes of working in the system and out of the system. We take care of each other so that each of us can do what we need to do to make the contribution we are meant to make.
Substrategy:
Passing on our knowledge and wisdom
Knowing that we will be fighting for birth justice long after those of who make up the landscape today have joined our ancestors, passing on our knowledge and wisdom is a critical strategy for our movement’s longevity. Achieving liberation is a multigenerational project, so we need to pass down the tools for the next generation to continue the work, starting them off from a place that is further along than where we ourselves began. To do this, we mentor. We put our findings in writing, give presentations, and speak on panels. We bring young people into the work, giving them opportunities and context. We are generous with our knowledge and wisdom.
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Build Beloved Community
“We have such great collaborations with folks all over the country. I [could] name a lot of people… In Los Angeles, my most cherished collaboration is probably with the LA Public Health Department, and the AIM program there, and a group called Cherished Futures. In San Francisco, we work very closely with another birth justice collaborative, and Jyesha Wren and her BElovedBIRTH Black Centering team. I'm trying to think of one national partner—we have so many… Also, on the other side of that, a lot of times our treasured relationships, particularly running a nonprofit, are with the funders who respect [us].”
—Kimberly Seals Allers
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Invest in Community Care
“It is imperative that we have community care. I've been talking about community care more than self-care, because I think you have to have a lot of privilege to do self-care. As women of color, we have to take care of each other. We have to look at one another and say, ‘Girl, you need a break,’ and be the safety net for one another… Doing that for one another is imperative to keep each other in the game—allowing one another to take breaks, passing the baton when need be. That’s how we’re going to not quit, because I think all of us should quit every now and then, even if it’s just for five minutes, or five months, or even five years.”
—Pia Long, Murmuration #2
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Mentor the Next Generation
“We have to have a responsibility to mentor and to bring alongside the next generation who can be in those spaces with us and witness the conversation, and also learn from what's happened before, because people make the same mistakes when they don't... The discoveries we made [in the past] need to be built on as opposed to redone.”
—Saraswathi Vedam
Manifesting the world we want to live in
Substrategies:
Offering a different kind of care, care rooted in community
Substrategy:
Offering a different kind of care, care rooted in community
This strategy is us implementing solutions, as we have been, will continue to do, and keep trying to tell everyone about! This is us actually just providing the type of care we believe everyone deserves, in the ways that we know are possible, and doing it in our communities—creating space in and empowering our communities. It is care (midwifery, doula, wraparound services, whatever it may be) with our people, our cultures, at the center.
We often make personal sacrifices to provide these services and solutions [Financial Instability]. Every time we manifest and share these alternatives, these models for our thriving, it represents a multi-layered and tremendous investment of resources and sacrifices. These are labors of love and gifts we give to ourselves, our communities, and our future ancestors.
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Answer Work
“[Regarding opening Birth Sanctuary Gainesville, the first freestanding birth center in Alabama] I'm doing answer work. Research is done. We can collect data while we're doing our solutions, but I'm not just doing more data collection. The numbers are what they are, and if we don't make a clear interjection into the way that we're caring for individuals, it's just going to continue to get worse.”
—Stephanie Mitchell
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Center Black Culture + Blackness
“Many people in the community are working really closely with individuals and families to provide care that is sorely lacking in the healthcare system… There are Black birth workers, doulas, midwives, lactation consultants, and community-based organizations who have amazing, transformative ideas about how they can improve the care provided for Black birthing people and are really developing these innovative models that honor, lift up, and value Black culture, the collective experience of Black culture and Blackness, and also holding space for all of the individual ways that Black culture and Blackness are expressed.”
—Noelene Jeffers
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Birth Is Communal
“I went on to have a very successful home birth after two C-sections... It was a full moon night, and it was the most wondrous experience. I invited the community back to my home two weeks later for a naming ceremony so that everyone could see what they helped me accomplish, and it changed our entire region, just that one birth. Because the small number of Black home births that were happening were happening in a silo, [whereas] everybody was involved in this."
—Okunsola M. Amadou
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Community Wellness
“I'm really proud of Birthland, which is my most recent practice. My practice is in transition right now, but in 2019 we launched a variation of an easy access clinic. We had a place where we provided pre- and postnatal care and a few wraparound services, and created a really accessible financial pay structure so that people could get home birth care. We were offering home birth services, but the pre- and postnatal care was happening in our space. We did group prenatals there. People were getting body work, acupuncture, childbirth education. It was just a beautiful perinatal wellness space, and has a really powerful community [that] has come out of that wellness space, [that shows] our commitment to building community and keeping folks together beyond the perinatal year.”
—Kiki Jordan
Changing the structures we operate in today
Substrategies:
Working inside the system
Working outside the system
Changing policies that create hostile environments
Substrategy:
Working inside the system
Recognizing that 98% of births take place in the hospital (due to obstetrics’ history of dominance over childbirth and policies that restrict equitable access to community midwifery care), some of us are working within the system to make hospitals a safer place for birthing people.
Some of us are clinicians in hospitals. In fact, most midwives work in hospitals. As a hospital-based CNM, Mimi Bhatt (Niles) aimed to “prevent unnecessary interventions and ensure that people [were] being educated to their fullest capacity and that their social systems [were] being involved in the decision making.”
Some of us develop protocols for midwifery integration. Others push for the uptake of support models and tools, like doula care and birth plans. We apply pressure on quality improvement programs, asserting the need for an undergirding analysis of oppressive systems. We take things all the way back to provider education, filling the gaps in medical school curricula, which includes addressing the systems of oppression that are embedded in medical education, from anti-Blackness to heteropatriarchy and beyond. We’re steeping providers in birth justice principles and retraining them on physiologic birth itself.
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Build Bridges
“For those of us that are representatives, in some ways, of [the mainstream healthcare system] in the birth justice space, our value is not fully appreciated. Because if the distrust is toward the institution, and you have someone who is an agent of that system, like me [as a CNM], there is a cognitive dissonance of like, ‘Well, then, how can this particular person speak to this particular issue?’ But the fact of the matter is, 98% of people are getting their care in that system, so you do need to build strong allyship and strong bridges between those two worlds.”
—Mimi Bhatt (Niles)
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Manifest Our Visions
“To me, birth justice is [when] I can know and I get to know and I do know what I need to be healthy, before somebody else has to take care of me. I can know that. I have access to the information and the resources to give myself the best nutrition that I need, to set myself up in an optimal way to be pregnant and [give] birth. I can access people to be on my team, my sovereign, self-determined team, to assist me in my process of bringing forth life to the planet, whether that's a midwife, or an OB, or a lactation consultant, or a doula. I get to curate in my own power as a birther, for God, as far as I'm concerned. I am sovereign in that, and they're available to me in the way that I need them to be, so they need to look like me, they need to understand my particular culture, that I have a wife, that I was raised Muslim and Christian, and that I like incense and candles and that I want a water birth… but that I’m not an extremist. I’m actually neutral, and you can see me for all that I am… I would have people available and accessible and trained enough and experienced enough to actually care for me in my uniqueness, and that every birther has that.”
—Dr. Sayida Peprah-Wilson
Substrategy:
Working outside the system
By manifesting the world we want to live in [Manifesting the world we want to live in], we create models that demonstrate an alternative, another way to provide care. These models have the power to shift discourse and put pressure on the mainstream system to change. In a country where the vast majority of people can only imagine birth as an emergency managed by a surgeon in a hospital, it’s important to show the public and providers themselves that there is another way.
Substrategy:
Changing policies that create hostile environments
Many of us have found ourselves in policy work because we’ve run up against a policy that has made the other work we set out to do (like attending birth as a midwife), overly cumbersome, nearly impossible. So we got into policy work to remove that obstacle, and came to understand that policy advocacy is necessary for creating the structural conditions for birth justice to be realized.
As the underlying rulebook that shapes our healthcare ecosystem, policy dictates how money flows through it, who and what are regulated and how, and which types of care we each have access to and from whom. Policy can hinder or support our efforts to make high quality, culturally concordant perinatal care accessible to everyone.
Having been harmed for far too long by policy designed as an hindrance, we are wresting the policymaking process away from powerful entities invested in the status quo. With the little resources we have, we are shifting the policy arena to be community-led. And that is the key to our strategy: empowering birth workers and birthing people to develop our policy platforms and advocate for policy change, to be the writers of a new rulebook rooted in justice.
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Start With Birth Workers & Birthing People
“We're not just going to go and look at birth outcomes and then tweak the system around the edges. We're going to start with people, in this case, birth workers, as a core audience and ask them, ‘What is your experience? What is wrong in the system? What works and what doesn't? What do you need to be whole? What about this work is joyful?’ Creating that space for those folks to be in community with one another is part of centering the people most impacted, in this case, birth workers and their clients.”
—Kalpana Krishnamurthy
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Shifting the Policy Arena
“I'm constantly energized by our birth justice partners, many of whom I know don't have dedicated funding or even dedicated policy staff. They still continue to show up in the policy space, because they know their livelihoods or their communities depend on it. It's been really exciting to see the shift in policy engagement. It's exciting to see them build their own expertise and their desire to help draft bills and give feedback, understanding things like ‘this bill is not going to work in our favor’ and being able to talk to legislators about that directly.”
—Breana Lipscomb
Harnessing power
Substrategies:
Claiming power
Holding power accountable
Partnering with power
Substrategy:
Claiming power
We are taking seats at the table (both others’ and our own) and we are stepping into roles of authority. Some of us have risen the ranks of the mainstream healthcare system, from doula to nurse to midwife. A few of us are OBGYNs. We sit on the boards and executive teams of professional associations and lead their committees. We are CEOs and program officers for funding organizations. Holding these positions of power gains us access to “the room where it happens,” giving us insight into how those with power operate and granting us influence in decision making that affects our communities. In care settings, having authority allows us to actively protect birthing people in the day to day.
Substrategy:
Holding power accountable
When we ourselves don’t hold the resources or decision making power, the situation sometimes calls for us to bend those who do to respond to our communities’ needs. Kimberly Seals Allers is unequivocal about her tactic: using public pressure to impact the ability of hospitals with poor outcomes to generate revenue and profit. Others demand that professional associations mobilize to address the perinatal health crisis and its underlying racial disparities. We are unafraid to pressure midwives with privilege to bring their services into communities for whom midwifery care is typically inaccessible. We help victims of obstetric violence file complaints with the Office of Civil Rights.
Substrategy:
Partnering with power
Of course, there are many instances in which we choose collaboration. We build bridges to those with power and nurture partnerships based on trust and understanding. Sometimes this is the path of least resistance to achieve our goals (which can also bear unexpected fruits), as with funders who just “get it.” Sometimes it’s the only way to get there. In states with a reduced or restricted practice environment, CPMs turn to OBGYNs who can make their work possible. Complex projects like Melissa Cheyney’s Community Doula Program, both a direct service program and research project, require the pulling together of all the people who can grease the wheels and give green lights, from hospital administrators to government officials.
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Power in the Badge
“Having the epiphany that if you were the provider instead of the nurse, it gives you power. There's power that comes with that badge, so I trained as a nurse midwife. Then after a few years, I went into the graduate medical education component, because as the midwife, I have more power. Now I have power over how my patients are treated. Then, after that, in a setting where there's an academic medical center where too many of us end up, I can now dictate the behavior of all of the residents under my purview. This was my small act of resistance.”
—Michelle Drew
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Apply Pressure
“Our big picture work is obviously holding hospitals accountable. That’s the whole point of Irth, in terms of publicly shared ratings and reviews, using public pressure... I say all the time, I tell hospitals to their face, ‘I don't know if you care about Black people. I actually don't care if you care about Black people. I'm tired of asking, so I'll focus on what I know you do care about: your reputation. You care about maternity care as a cost center. You care because you understand that mothers and birthing parents are key decision makers about healthcare decisions in their home.’ That’s how I talk to hospitals. I don't give a hoot whether they care about Black people. It's not something that I spend my energy thinking about. I focus on what I know they actually care about, so holding them accountable is the whole reason why Irth App exists.”
—Kimberly Seals Allers
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Bring People to the Table
“When I ask myself who I have to collaborate with to make the Community Doula Program happen, a lot of times I immediately start with other doulas and midwives who are my people. But for it to work, I also have to have nurse managers, WIC, obstetricians… Pretty much everybody has to be at the table if we're going to get those referrals in.”
—Melissa Cheyney
Shaping the narrative
Substrategies:
Calling out racism
Educating the public
Telling our stories
Substrategy:
Calling out racism
Despite constant distractions drawing all our eyes away from how white supremacy, colonialism, and anti-Black racism assert themselves into our lives, we are focused. We are adamant about naming the problem as and keeping the conversation on “racism, not race,” so we can continue to apply resources toward eradication of the root of the problem, not just the symptoms. Despite the incredible burden upon Black birth justice actors and others who experience racism, we “call a thing a thing” and demand that all attempts to solve the perinatal health crisis include this analysis.
Substrategy:
Educating the public
To recruit supporters for our cause and new members of our movement, we are setting the story straight on pregnancy and birth, and informing the public on birthing people’s rights.
Many people’s ideas about birth stem from what we see in the movies. Most of us receive little to no education about how human reproduction works, only starting to seek out information when we begin our family formation journeys. Those of us in the birth justice movement believe we can do so much better. Rather than waiting until a person is pregnant to start giving them and their family the tools and information they need for a joyful pregnancy and birth, we believe in education across the lifetime for all people. So, we teach folks about physiologic birth, community birth, the midwifery model, and doula care. We produce educational materials like magazines, podcasts, and apps.
We also equip people with a human rights lens for pregnancy and birth, with the knowledge of what affirming care looks like as opposed to disrespect and violence. With a healthcare system that violates birthing people’s rights so often that breaches are almost normalized, it’s not uncommon for birthing people to realize, when exposed to our work, that they carry trauma from birth experiences they hadn’t previously been able to name as traumatic.
They deserve better. We all do, so we spread the message that all birthing people have a right to their autonomy, their sovereignty, and that we, as a society (not just a movement), can and should remake a healthcare system that repeatedly, systematically, violates these rights.
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It's Not Race, It's Racism
“One of the key moments was Dr. Joia [Crear-Perry] saying, ‘It's not race, it's racism.’ …That was one of the more clear and succinct messaging threads that allow people to get it right.”
—Kimberly Seals Allers
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Foregrounding Harmful Disparities
"I really feel like there has been a seismic shift in attention to the racism that is baked into our health system and how that is affecting people, how that's killing people. It was really remarkable to hear mainstream media talking during the early days of COVID about the racial disparities. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Black Lives Matter movement for foregrounding those things."
—Farah Diaz-Tello
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Disrupt the Sanitized Narratives
"[We need] a lot of different strategies all at once, like culture shift, [for people to realize] that babies can be born at home… and disrupting the sanitized narratives we have of what it means to be pregnant and give birth, [which] include a lot more possibilities. It's not neat, heteronormative… You pee on a stick and then you have a baby, like it's a straight throughline from A to Z. Some people lose the pregnancy. Some people give birth to a baby that doesn't survive. People are pregnant in all sorts of different circumstances. They may have a substance use issue or they may have mental health issues...."
—Farah Diaz-Tello
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A Human Rights Issue
“I think moving the justice conversation into the human rights sphere is [really important…] Making [the perinatal health crisis] a consumer awareness, and everybody's awareness, just like what happened with Me Too, that that's not okay, that [the bad outcomes are] just not acceptable anymore. I think that's a really important place where we need to put money and energy and thought into. What's the messaging?”
—Saraswathi Vedam
Substrategy:
Telling our stories
If hope, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba tells us, is a discipline, then telling our stories is a strategy for generating it.
As much as we need to be aware and alert of the dangers of systemic oppression within the mainstream healthcare system, there is also so much to be learned and gained from reminders that joyous, powerful birth is possible. We know that along with the approximately 800 pregnant people who die in the United States every year, there are thousands and thousands of people who have beautiful, healthy pregnancies; transformative births; and peaceful postpartum.
In tandem with educating the public, and yet going beyond it, the act of telling the stories of birthing people in our communities not only garners support for our movement, but also helps to keep us afloat, motivated, and inspired amid the onslaught of grim epidemiological statistics. Telling our stories, having the ability to own our stories, empowers us to bestow ourselves with dignity, and when we make a point to center joy in our storytelling, it fosters hope.
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Stories With Complexity, With Dignity
“I think what's really important right now is to tell stories. I think it's incredibly important to tell those stories over and over and over again… I want women to be able to be like men in that their stories are told, there's a multiplicity of stories, …that we can just be human beings with different stories, and they can be complicated, without judgment, without blame, and with dignity.”
—Nina Martin
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Lessons From Joy
“I host a podcast called Birthright where I only tell joyful birthing stories, and I specifically sought grant funding for this... to shift the narrative in Black maternal health. There's so much doom and gloom, a lot of focus on negative statistics, and for me that was deeply concerning. I was writing about my concern for that even though people were upset with me, and they were like, ‘Kimberly, we need the glaring statistics to make them aware.’ I'm like, ‘Okay, but at what cost? What is the cost to the actual Black and brown birthing people who are also hearing these stories all the time?’ Last season, when we wrapped, I brought in a team of qualitative researchers who analyzed our two seasons of transcripts—23 episodes, 55 guests—and I asked them a simple question: What could doctors and nurses learn from Black birth and joy? They created what is an amazing, 90-minute, interactive learning session that's really rooted in lessons from joy, not just from our deaths and our near deaths and our negative statistics."
—Kimberly Seals Allers
Allowing the work to transform us
Substrategies:
Being guided by the transformative power of birth
Substrategy:
Being guided by the transformative power of birth
In the birth justice world, you’ve likely heard or said it yourself… Birth has a profound effect. It shifts the energy around us. It changes us, whether we’re present as active participant or witness, or in the room at all. Its power reverberates through time and space, and we believe in, channel, and allow that power to transform everything, from the systems with which we grapple to our very selves.
We are imagining our futures: radically safer, healthier, more empowering conditions for our descendants. We intend to leave the world better than we found it and we expect to be changed in that process. In the words of Black freedom fighters who mobilized for racial justice and Black power the summer of 2020, we are heeding our mandate to “be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.”
Envision it.
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Transcending Time, Experiencing Euphoria
“When I'm laboring with someone, and we're in sync and it's quiet, [in] that amazing space that you create where time is transcended in a labor, to really intuitively connect with what that person needs and do your absolute best… Even if you fall short, you know they can feel your intentions. They can feel the degree to which you are trying to give them what they need, to help find and take for themselves what they need. Then, it comes to a head, and that climax of feeling the baby's head press into my hand... It's invigorating. It's exhilarating to feel that head pushing into my hand and to catch the baby. I like to lift the baby up so the person can see them and reach for them when they're ready. I love that moment when they look at the baby's face and reach for them and pull the baby to them. That is euphoria.”
—Melissa Cheyney
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Seeing the Light
“After that first home birth, which was a transformative experience, I felt like everything I knew about birth before that was a lie. Now I'd been exposed to the truth. It was totally a road to Damascus conversion.”
—Hakima Payne
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Sharing Liberation
"My life's calling, in addition to being a midwife, is to participate in the psychological liberation of Black people. There isn't anything that can happen in my life where I won't infuse that commitment… My own birth experience was a resistance choice, a birth justice choice, [though] I was completely unaware of the term and the framework at that time. I immediately felt after I gave birth [at home] that I wanted more Black women to have the kind of experience that I had."
—Kiki Jordan