Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth

262 Pages·2016·2.794 MB·English

by  Julia Chinyere Oparah (Editor), Alicia D. Bonaparte (Editor)

2
BIRTHING JUSTICE
BLACK WOMEN, PREGNANCY, AND CHILDBIRTH

edited by
Julia Chinyere Oparah
and
Alicia D. Bonaparte

3
First published 2015 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2015, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Birthing justice: black women, pregnancy, and childbirth/edited by Julia Chinyere Oparah and
Alicia D. Bonaparte.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-836-8 (hardcover: alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-1-61205-916-7 (library ebook)—
I. Oparah, Julia Chinyere, editor. II. Bonaparte, Alicia D., editor.
1. Maternal Health Services—United States. 2. African Americans—ethnology—United
States. 3. Civil Rights—United States. 4. Parturition—ethnology—United States. 5. Pregnant
Women—ethnology—United States. 6. Social Justice—United States.
RG964.G72
362.19820089’96073—dc23
2014049717

ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-836-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-837-5 (pbk)
4
Contents

Foreword, Shafia Monroe
Foreword, Jeanne Flavin
Acknowledgments
Introduction Beyond Coercion and Malign Neglect: Black Women and the Struggle for Birth Justice
Julia Chinyere Oparah with Black Women Birthing Justice
I Birthing Histories
1 Queen Elizabeth Perry Turner: “Granny Midwife,” 1931–1956
Darline Turner
2 Regulating Childbirth: Physicians and Granny Midwives in South Carolina
Alicia D. Bonaparte
3 Between Traditional Knowledge and Western Medicine: Women Birthing in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
Christina Mudokwenyu-Rawdon, Peggy Dube, Nester T. Moyo, and Stephen Munjanja
II Beyond Medical versus Natural Redefining Birth Injustice
4 An Abolitionist Mama Speaks: On Natural Birth and Miscarriage
Viviane Saleh-Hanna
5 Mothering: A Post-C-Section Journey
Jacinda Townsend
6 Confessions of a Black Pregnant Dad
Syrus Marcus Ware
7 Birth Justice and Population Control
Loretta J. Ross
8 Beyond Silence and Stigma: Pregnancy and HIV for Black Women in Canada
Marvelous Muchenje and Victoria Logan Kennedy
9 What I Carry: A Story of Love and Loss
Iris Jacob
10 Images from the Safe Motherhood Quilt
Ina May Gaskin and Laura Gilkey
5
III Changing Lives, One Birth at a Time
11 Birthing Sexual Freedom and Healing: A Survivor Mother’s Birth Story
Biany Pérez
12 Birth as Battle Cry: A Doula’s Journey from Home to Hospital
Gina Mariela Rodriguez
13 Sister Midwife: Nurturing and Reflecting Black Womanhood in an Urban Hospital
Stephanie Etienne
14 A Love Letter to My Daughter: Love as a Political Act
Haile Eshe Cole
15 New Visions in Birth, Intimacy, Kinship, and Sisterly Partnerships
Shannon Gibney and Valerie Deus
16 I Am My Hermana’s Keeper: Reclaiming Afro-Indigenous Ancestral Wisdom as a Doula
Griselda Rodriguez
17 The First Cut Is the Deepest: A Mother-Daughter Conversation about Birth, Justice, Healing, and Love
Pauline Ann McKenzie-Day and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
IV Taking Back Our Power Organizing for Birth Justice
18 Unexpected Allies: Obstetrician Activism, VBACs, and the Birth Justice Movement
Christ-Ann Magloire and Julia Chinyere Oparah
19 Birthing Freedom: Black American Midwifery and Liberation Struggles
Ruth Hays
20 Becoming an Outsider-Within: Jennie Joseph’s Activism in Florida Midwifery
Alicia D. Bonaparte and Jennie Joseph
21 Beyond Shackling: Prisons, Pregnancy, and the Struggle for Birth Justice
Priscilla A. Ocen and Julia Chinyere Oparah
Notes
Index
About the Contributors
6
Foreword
Shafia Monroe
This anthology is a testimonial to the black women who have been leaders in the birth movement from the
very beginning. Long before the term “birth justice” was coined, black women used traditional childbearing
knowledge, oral histories, human rights organizing, and policy work in their efforts to end inequities in
maternal, infant, and child health. Building on resistance to the abuse of pregnant black women during slavery
and to the dismantling of our birth traditions and family structures, our foremothers paved the way for today’s
birth justice activism.
This work continues to be critical because African American women’s maternal health is in a state of
emergency: our cesarean section rate is disproportionately high, we experience the highest maternal mortality
rate in the United States, we receive less medical support to continue breastfeeding past twelve weeks, and our
infants are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white infants. Only by giving
women power to direct their birth experience, to access natural and home birth, and to breastfeed beyond one
year will we be able to reduce intolerable rates of infant and maternal mortality.
Our present day birth justice movement honors its ancestors. We remember the Mississippi and Tuskegee
nurse-midwifery schools, the Traditional Childbearing Group, Childbirth Providers of African Descent, and
others, while lifting up sheroes, including Byllye Avery, Loretta Ross, Ayanna Ade, and Nonkululeko
Tyehemba, as well as organizations such as the Harlem Birth Action Committee, the International Center for
Traditional Childbearing, SisterSong, Ancient Song Doula Services, Mobile Midwife, Black Women
Birthing Resistance, Black Women Birthing Justice, Commonsense Childbirth, and many others. This
anthology is intimate and captivating, introducing the women and organizations who have paved the way,
alongside current movements and future hopes for women to reclaim their birthing rights.
As we remember the ancestors and their struggles for safe and empowering childbirth, we must honor the
traditional midwife. In black communities in the United States and other parts of the diaspora, the midwife
was historically the protector of birth, teaching women how to birth and safeguarding childbearing and
mothering traditions. As this anthology documents, the starkest birth injustice is the systemic eradication of
the black midwife from her community by the Eurocentric patriarchal medical system. On the African
continent, the demotion of midwives to traditional birth attendants mirrors the attack on traditional midwives
in the United States. The after effect continues to this day. Fortunately, through the efforts of the birth justice
movement, women of color are entering midwifery training and becoming midwives at record numbers; at the
same time, the number of home births is rising in the black community.
Testifying to the resilience of black women is a critical part of a holistic approach to restoring our health. It
is exciting that the hidden her-story of the battle waged by black women and trans/gender nonconforming
birthing parents against birth injustice is finally in print. Here is an essential source for high schools and
colleges, midwifery and medical schools, birth workers and birth activists. At last we have a blueprint for
improving health equity and enabling black women—as well as other birthing parents of color—to believe in
7
their bodies’ sacred power and to direct their own birth experiences.
Birth justice is on the rise. Women and trans/gender nonconforming birthing parents are mobilizing
internationally to reclaim birth as beautiful, spiritual, and normal and to demand their human right to birth
and breastfeed their infants according to their own traditions. Women are returning to midwifery care as the
norm, and many see midwives as guardians of normal birth. Black midwives are keeping it real and
empowering families. It is up to all of us to ensure that this movement toward birth justice continues.
I am moved by this tribute to birth justice and relieved that it is authenticated through its origins in the
birth justice movement. In chronicling the movement, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Alicia D. Bonaparte, and the
women of Black Women Birthing Justice engender pride, build camaraderie, and inspire action. Thank you,
sisters, for your work.
8
Foreword
Jeanne Flavin
It was a late August afternoon. I was riding a bike on the road that ran by our small family farm and got called
into the house. I found Dad in the kitchen, doing dishes. Doing dishes? Though I was only ten years old, I
grasped the situation immediately: Mom, pregnant with her fifth and last child, had started labor.
Dad left my little sister and me in the care of an older brother and drove Mom nineteen miles to the
hospital in the next county. He came home just before dawn to tell us we had a brother, born at 3:03 a.m.
Later that day, he packed us kids into the car and took us to the hospital. He stationed my little sister and me
behind some bushes outside a window, and a few minutes later a nurse brought my little brother into the
room. Mom carried him over to the window so we could meet him. We were completely smitten.
About a year later, Mom was diagnosed with cancer and hospitalized for treatment some 175 miles away.
My dad moved to be with her, renting a room near the hospital while us five kids were looked after by a
combination of siblings, neighbors, and other relatives. My little brother and I were briefly sent to stay with
an aunt. I had only been separated from my parents on one other occasion—when my father was hospitalized
in a neighboring state after a farm accident. I was heartsick both times. Years later, I asked Mom if she had
been afraid she might not live. She replied in her matter-of-fact way, “I couldn’t think about not surviving. I
had five children and [the oldest] was still in high school.”
Mom survived her first cancer diagnosis but recently passed away after a second fight with the disease. The
editors invited me to write a foreword to Birthing Justice at a time when I still felt grief over my mother’s death
keenly. The timing reminded me how what Julia Chinyere Oparah refers to in the introduction as “mother-
love as a radical praxis” has played out in my own life, even though I’m not a mother and have never birthed a
baby. These life experiences—of welcoming a wanted (if not necessarily planned) child into a family, of being
involuntarily separated from my parents, of feeling jackknifing grief as an adult—have shaped my scholarship
on reproductive justice and kept it from being solely (or even mainly) an academic exercise.
Since 2006, I have worked with National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), an organization that
defends the basic principle that, upon becoming pregnant, a person should not lose any civil or human rights.
Along with executive director Lynn Paltrow and our NAPW colleagues, we have identified hundreds of cases
where women were arrested or otherwise deprived of physical liberty because they were pregnant. Women
have been locked up in mental hospitals after voluntarily seeking treatment for an opiate addiction, tied down
with leather wrist and ankle restraints and forced to undergo cesarean sections, and charged with murder after
surviving a suicide attempt but losing the pregnancy.
Like death and dying, pregnancy and childbirth can be powerful experiences, but they may also be a time of
vulnerability—a time when we may have to depend on others to ensure that our wishes are carried out, our
decisions are respected, and our rights and dignity are preserved. Increasingly, however, we find that
surveillance, blame, and punishment characterize our government responses to basic human needs rather than
9
respect, support, and compassion. Our criminal prosecution system enforces ideas about who is “fit” to carry a
pregnancy or mother a child and punishes those deemed to fall short. In this context, the rights of black
women and trans/gender nonconforming individuals to privacy, to health care, and to birthing and parenting
their children with dignity are brutally disregarded.
The contributors to this important volume write not only of the relationships between a parent and child
and others in their lives but also about the racism and other structural forces that threaten these ties.
Addressing these threats requires that we recognize the connections between birth justice and other forms of
social justice, including racial and economic justice and the movement to end the war on drugs. Fittingly,
Birthing Justice also speaks to resilience and the power of collective action forged out of struggle; it reminds us
that black women and black trans/gender non-conforming individuals continue to resist the devaluation of
their personhood and to mobilize for social change. This book and the advocacy and scholarship that inform
and surround it promise to energize and advance our movements in important ways.
Birthing Justice accords experiences of pregnancy, birthing, and mothering respect, even reverence. Indeed,
the creating and nurturing of new life and bringing it into the world—like the ways by which we take leave of
it—deserve nothing less than this from all of us.
10