I have a guest post up at Viva La Feminista today for the Summer of Feminista series. Veronica Arreola, the awesome blog mistress over there solicited posts from latinas about their experiences with feminism.

I wrote a quick post about feminism in my Cuban-american family. Here is a quick excerpt:

The women in my Cuban-immigrant family are definitely feminist. I’m not sure how many of them would identify with the f-word themselves, but they were definitely my feminist role models. Let’s start with my mom–an immigrant herself, who came from Cuba when she was only thirteen. After divorcing my dad when I was four, she’s been a paragon of strength–raising two kids, a vibrant academic career. All on her own, all without a partner in her life. She I can pretty safely say would call herself a feminist. Her sisters though? Not as likely.

I didn’t grow up under a banner of feminism–if my mom was an activist in the 70s, it wasn’t under that banner either. But damn if the women in my family aren’t strong as hell–and that taught me feminism loud and clear, even if I never knew the word until college (or maybe high school, but then only as an insult).

Read the rest here, and if you’re Latina, think about participating!

Tonight, if you’re in DC you should come to a reading I am participating in. I’ll be reading from a piece that will be published in a forthcoming anthology about Butch and Femme identity. It’s called “Coming Back Around to Butch”

Details:

*Sparkle* is a queer-driven reading series for all at Busboys and Poets, 5th and K. Hosted by Regie Cabico and Danielle Evennou, *Sparkle* is an open mic with featured performer(s) that occurs at 9 PM on the fourth Wednesday of every month.

Spoken word by mothertongue’s Danielle Evennou alongside words by activist, writer and Feministing.com Editor, Miriam Zoila Pérez. Plus open mic!

Wednesday, August 25th at 9pm

Busboys and Poets, 5th St NW and K St NW, Washington DC

Facebook event here.

Hope to see some of you!

Next week, I’ll be attending the 2010 Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, hosted by the Lambda Literary Foundation. I’m super psyched to have been picked along with 32 other amazing LGBT writers (including fellow radical doula Valerie Wetlaufer!).

I’ll be in the non-fiction track, working on a manuscript for a book project that has been in the works for a year or so. Yay!

It’s my first time with formal writing instruction in non-fiction and I’m super psyched.

I will also be taking some time off (mostly). As a self-employed writer and consultant, vacation is tough. But it’s also crucial. So I will be partially disconnecting until Labor Day. The plan is to still have some posts here at Radical Doula, but we’ll see how that goes. I will also be spending a week on this lovely lovely organic farm I worked at last summer.

Hasta septiembre!

This is a series highlighting folks who identify as Radical Doulas. Are you interested in being part of the series? Email me.

Monica Brasile has been a Certified Childbirth Educator and Doula since 1996, and is a founder and steering committee member of Friends of Iowa Midwives, a statewide grassroots organization working to increase access to midwifery care in Iowa. She is a PhD Candidate and Graduate Instructor in the department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, and has taught several courses on women’s health and activism, including Feminism and Social Change and Issues in Reproductive Justice. She lives in Iowa City with her partner and teenage son. Her website is www.mapleseedbirth.com.

RD: What inspired you to become a doula?

MB: When I gave birth to my son at home, I was 19 and single. The loving, respectful care I received from my midwife was a welcome respite from the highly charged atmosphere of welfare reform anxiety that surrounded young single moms in the early 1990s. For me, giving birth was a hugely transformative, empowering, and positive experience. That experience gave me a passion for helping others arrive on the other side of birth feeling confident, strong, and supported, rather than violated, afraid, and alone. I am a doula because I believe that all women deserve to be trusted, listened to, and cared for respectfully. I believe that all women deserve access to information and the opportunity to make informed choices about pregnancy, birth, and parenting.

RD: What is your doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs?

MB: Because I believe that women should be the ones to decide what happens to their bodies, I work as a doula to help women to be at the center of the birth experience. I am committed to providing evidence-based, mother-friendly, non-judgmental birth services, with the belief that each birth is different and each family’s needs are unique. I believe that informed childbirth is an important facet of reproductive choice. By supporting women as a doula, I am supporting their reproductive autonomy. As a feminist, I see childbirth as an issue of reproductive and social justice, and I am interested in challenging ways in which birthing choices are often constrained by larger structural issues like poverty, racism, homophobia, access to health care, and the legal status of midwifery.

RD: What is your favorite thing about being a doula?

MB:I love being able to help a woman develop confidence in herself and her body, and I love experiencing the connection and trust that come with accompanying someone through the journey of labor. I am constantly grateful for the honor and privilege I have in encountering, on a regular basis, the wide range of ways that women’s deep strength manifests during the process of labor and birth. Being a doula connects me to my community in a unique and wonderful way, making me part of a large and diverse family.

RD: If you could change one thing about birth in the US, what would it be?

MB: I would like for all women to be able to access community-based, culturally appropriate prenatal, birth, and postpartum care, and for midwifery to be accessible, affordable, and legal throughout the country. The racial disparity in infant mortality needs to become a top priority in our nation’s health care agenda. I would like to see greater social support for new mothers, and I envision the transformation of the culture of fear surrounding birth into a culture of respect.

We now have 27 programs listed, including four outside the United States!

If you know of other programs I haven’t listed, please send them my way via email.

Good news!!! We are steps away from getting the midwifery bill—that so many of us have worked on for so long—passed this legislative session, which ends THIS SATURDAY, 31 July.

Even if you have already done so, please call and/or email your OWN Mass Rep. today, tomorrow, or any day you can this week, asking them to reach out to Speaker DeLeo to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote and to help pass the bill THIS SESSION.

Please note the bill, is now known as House 4810: An Act Relative to Certified Professional Midwives and Enhancing the Practice of Nurse-Midwives.

Who’s your rep? You can find them at the following link: http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/myelectioninfo.php

Text of the bill can be found at the following link: http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/house/186/ht04/ht04810.htm

Thank you again to the whole coalition for all of your excellent work. We could not have come this far without everyone’s expertise, experience, passion, and all the good work you are already doing to address this critical issue.

Keep the pressure on!!!
Ann Sweeney
President, Mass Friends of Midwives (MFOM)
www.mfom.org
617-901-2777

Take action today!

Stephanie Dank helps run the Harmony House, a medicinal herb cooperative in Lincoln, NE, working to build community around sustainable farming practices and healing holistically.  She is a full-time student, stay-at-home-mom, radical doula, and evolving herbalist, focusing much of her work in reclaiming the Wise Women Tradition of folk medicine and traditional midwifery/womancare.  She lives with a wild man she calls her partner, several hens, and a delightful, hilarious gift of a baby.  She likes to play the frame drum and take several deep breaths at a time.

What inspired you to become a doula?

When I started teaching workshops on positive menstruation I became a sort of agent for women to have access to all sorts of zines and alternative media about women’s health.  And so when I became pregnant, it was natural for me to seek out all of the empowering information out there about birth.  I soon found out that as easy as it was for me to find as somebody already tapped in, it wasn’t as accessible for most pregnant people.  I wanted to become a doula to help others have access to information that could empower their experiences.  Also, birth rights are extremely restricted here in Nebraska, so I want to help broaden the spectrum of options.  I had an doula-attended, drug-free hospital birth.  I’m proof that it can be done with the right support.

Why do you identify with the term radical doula?

Birth is a feminist issue, and it’s a radical feminist issue in that it often gets left out of the mainline feminist discussion, not to mention the reproductive rights debate.  I definitely see myself as an agent of change on the political front by working to empower women to be in control of their own experience.  There needs to be more birth workers out there that align themselves with some sort of intent, because the landscape of this work is in need of a lot of change.  There are doulas that stay neutral and accessible to people who are turned off by attaching ideology to their birth experience, and that’s totally fine.  My community doesn’t need another doula like that.  I’ve had to come to the decision to be out with my intent whether it works against me sometimes or not.

What is your doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs?

I work to provide access to as much information to mothers and families as possible.  I believe that a lack of information feeds fear, and that fear is the biggest factor in the amount of pain and trauma during and after childbirth.  As a doula, I try to offer as many resources for a non-violent birth as possible, and this is a draw from my political and spiritual beliefs.  Helping women to reclaim their power, starting with their health, is, to me, the first step to positive transformation from a patriarchal, scientific and violent paradigm.  Peaceful birth has the ability to transform the way we accept children into our communities, how we conduct our intimate relationships, and the way we feel about our bodies.  I work with my clients to open dialogue on these issues, but to also support them in whatever informed decisions they make.

If you could change one thing about birth in the US, what would it be?

Definitely the structure of support around pregnant and postpartum women.  It’s our birth rite to be surrounded by an unspoken infrastructure of supportive, experienced women while going through this process, and so if I could change anything, it would be to give back the rite of passage that birth once was to mothers, and restore it’s ability to bring communities together.  Pregnancy and birth would be trusted.  It would be sacred again.

You can listen to or read the story here.

The movement to outlaw shackling is gaining traction, and unlike much of what we work on, this issue has few opponents (not none, but few).

But even when we are able to push through legislative measures, the fight doesn’t end there. Enforcement of these measures is really difficult, because of the complicated system of authority in prisons. Procedure can be decided by one authority figure in the prison.

A doula I know who works with incarcerated women recently explained to me that putting restrictions on shackling isn’t enough. It isn’t just about shackling during delivery, or even labor, but also during routine medical exams for folks who are pregnant and folks who are not.

The bottom line is that we can’t stop just with these policies. It’s connected to the broader issue of how folks are treated when they are incarcerated, and how we make sure these changes get enforced.

For more background check out this article by Anna Clark at RH Reality Check.

Nekole Shapiro synthesizes a lifetime of experience as a body worker and Tantric practitioner, her birthing experiences as a mother and doula and her profound love of science into TantricBirth, a holistic approach to the birthing experience. The TantricBirth system uses interviews, presentations, classes and direct family planning and birth support to enable families to have an empowered birth experience. Nekole is an LMP and holds a BA in Asian Studies and a Premedical certificate from Columbia University.

An Introduction to TantricBirth

Our human experience is deliciously deep.  It is impossible to affect one aspect of ourselves without affecting another.  Our parts are woven together like a tapestry.  When I hold my baby and feel love, my body undergoes a change, my spirit is affected and my mind is altered.  When I am embodied, I am aware of all of this as it happens and can feel it in every cell of my being.  When I am embodied, I feel my power.

Other than during her own birth or death, a birthing woman enters the most altered physiological state of her life.   Because we are an interconnected weave of human experience and expression, this altered physiological state is also an altered emotional, mental and spiritual state.  All of who we are is changing at a rapid pace as we labor and birth our babies, and again as our bodies get used to no longer housing a baby.  In this way, if I can embody the birthing experience, I can access a power greater than any I have felt before.

I utilize techniques that engage and integrate the body, mind, emotions and spirit when supporting a family to have a TantricBirth experience.  Prior to pregnancy, I engage the mind in the process of learning what options are available to the family.  I cover topics such as: What type of birth does your insurance cover?   What birthing facilities are available in the area?  What care providers are available and will they interview?  I bring women into their physical bodies.  I ask them to become aware of their menstrual cycles, to get their bodies open via bodywork, breath work, yoga, dancing, and whatever mediums they like.  I invite them to investigate the parts of their body that will conceive and birth their baby.  With each aspect of what I teach, emotions may arise.  We pay close attention to them and allow room for them to be investigated.   These practices and many others facilitate birth embodiment prior to the birth itself.  It is preparation for birth.  It is preparation for parenthood.  It is preparation for the rest of your life.

If one life is deep, multiple lives interwoven together are cavernous.  TantricBirth supports building the family unit before the child is conceived.  This means building the intimacy of the future parents.  I ask all partners to be present for all sessions.  We talk about how their relationship is doing and how each partner is feeling.  I engage them in practices to build their intimacy and of course give a good amount of juicy homework.  Building the primary parental relationships prior to conception and birth builds a strong foundation from which the family can grow and a new life can be fostered.

TantricBirth is a model of birth support that aims to empower the family unit through holistic embodiment practices and intimacy building exercises.  Like labor and birth, it is fun, thrilling, hard, and fulfilling work with an outcome more powerful than you can imagine!  Let’s bring people’s attention to this reality.  Let’s prepare and support them to have an embodied birthing experience.  Holistic preparation and support can facilitate a birthing experience that connects us to our power and heals us from the shackles that previously kept us from it.

Guest post by Nekole Shapiro