This is a series highlighting folks who identify as Radical Doulas. Are you interested in being part of the series? Go here to provide your responses to the profile questions and I’ll include you!
About Cherry: I am a wife and mother of two grown children. I live in Southeastern Michigan. I am passionate about all things birth-related. I AM a birth-junkie. www.facebook.com/cherry.herrick
What inspired you to become a doula?
When I was on bed-rest after a surgery, I watched lots of t.v., and got hooked on the Birth Stories series. I knew then I desperately wanted to be involved in the birth process in some capacity. I had my sights set on midwifery, and am still working towards that as well. I was a young mother and gave birth to both of my children in local hospitals. My first birth experience was traumatic, and left me wondering what I did wrong for the nurses and doctors to treat me that way. My second birth experience was much better, but I still felt like there was something missing. Now I know what it was. I needed a doula!!!
Why do you identify with the term radical doula?
One definition of radical, is “going against social norms”. I find it unfortunate that our (American) social norms regarding childbirth is giving birth in a hospital, and submitting to all kinds of unnecessary intervention. I hospital births should be the exception, not the rule. Radical, I know. Additionally, many women give birth with one or more family members or friends present, while nurses check on them periodically. Friends and family members, however well-intentioned they may be, can NOT take the place of a doula!
What is your doula philosophy and how does it fit into your broader political beliefs?
I believe that a doula should be all that the laboring mother needs. A doula should provide support, physical, emotional, spiritual as necessary. She should know when to step in, and when to step back. As far as my political beliefs, I feel that there is too much governmental/institutional intervention in the labor and birth process.
What is your favorite thing about being a doula?
When I was attending a laboring friend, I looked her in the eyes and said, “You’re doing great! I’m so proud of you!” She teared up and said, “You are??”. Wow. “Of course! You’re awesome!” was my reply. It was great to see the sigh of relief as she realized that she was doing a-ok, pain and all! Seeing the miracle of a woman’s body going through all the natural motions and progressions of labor to ultimately give birth is unlike any other experience. It is a beautiful miracle.
If you could change one thing about the experience of pregnancy and birth, what would it be?
Educate every pregnant woman on her options! Too many women go through pregnancy having no idea that they have a choice as to where they can labor and give birth! They assume laboring should be done in a hospital, and birthing should be done laying flat on her back. We (doulas, midwives, moms, and self-proclaimed “birth junkies”!) need to empower women to make decisions that are right for her and her baby! Those decisions should be based on useful, correct, documented and verifiable information, not fear or intimidation.
I’ve written before about the increase in information, resources and stories about trans pregnancy. While we know a lot more now than just a few years ago because trans folks having babies are getting together to share info, there is still a lot to learn about the experience.
A provider who is queer, doula and midwife friendly asked me to share this call for participates in a survey about transmasculine pregnancy experiences. If you’re interested in participating, see below.
Pregnancy After Transitioning Study (PATS)
PATS Anonymous Survey – Online Information Sheet
We are doing a pilot study about transgender men’s’ experiences with pregnancy. This study aims to better understand how to best assist female-to-male transgender individuals who may want to become pregnant as well as how to counsel about pregnancy and possible birth outcomes. The data collected in this initial unfunded pilot study will offer some guidance to transgender men, and their healthcare providers, who are pregnant or interested in becoming pregnant. The results from this study will support and guide the development of future outcome-oriented clinical research in this area of intense growing interest and importance
This study is an anonymous online survey of people who identify as transgender men (assigned female at birth with a transmasculine/ transmale/ female-to-male gender identity) and have been pregnant and delivered a baby. If you self-identify with this population, then we would like to invite you to participate in this study.
If you choose to be in the study, you will complete a survey. This survey will help us learn more about transgender men (assigned female at birth with a transmasculine/transmale/female-to-male gender identity) who have been pregnant and completed the pregnancy. The survey will take about 20 minutes to complete. The questions will relate to your experience with fertility, conception, pregnancy, and birth. To be eligible for the study you must be over 18 years old and have completed a pregnancy within the past 10 years. You can skip questions that you do not want to answer or stop the survey at any time. The survey is anonymous, and no one will be able to link your answers back to you. Please do not include your name or other information that could be used to identify you in the survey responses.
All study results will be made available to the community through the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at the University of California, San Francisco. The mission of the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health is to increase access to comprehensive, effective, and affirming health care services for trans and gender-variant communities. More information can be found at http://transhealth.ucsf.edu.
Questions? Please contact the study coordinator Lexi Light (415-206-6453, LightA@obgyn.ucsf.edu). If you have questions or concerns about your rights as a research participant, you can call the UCSF Committee on Human Research at 415-476-1814.
Being in this study is optional. If you want to participate, click this link to start the survey: http://bit.ly/PATStudy
Additionally, the researchers at the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health (CoE) at UCSF are doing research that is designed to lead to better programs for transgender people. They want to know if you wish to learn more about their research studies or if you may wish to participate in any of the studies that may be appropriate for you. By clicking this second link & filling in your contact information, you will allow qualified professional people on the staff of the CoE to contact you in the future to ask if you want to participate in any studies. You will be entering your contact information into a different survey, completely separated from the above anonymous survey. You have no obligation to actually participate in any study.
By providing your information, if a study on transgender people needs subjects, you may be contacted to ask if you want to participate. You do not have to participate. You may withdraw permission to be contacted at any time by contacting the CoE. If you do not provide your information, there will be no penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled.
Participation in research may involve some loss of privacy. However, your contact information will be handled as confidentially as possible. Access will be limited to the data manager and the researcher organizing the study and will require a password. No information will be used for research without additional permission. Your contact information will not be shared with anyone outside the CoE.
There will be no cost or payment to you if you sign this form. If you have questions now or later, you can talk with the study researcher about any questions, concerns or complaints you have about this study. Contact the study researcher(s) Dr. Jae Sevelius at 415-597-9183.
If you wish to ask questions about the study or your rights as a research participant to someone other than the researchers or if you wish to voice any problems or concerns you may have about the study, please call the Office of the Committee on Human Research at 415-476-1814.
It’s been tough to say much of anything online, or otherwise, since the verdict came down on Saturday evening in which George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for the murder of Trayvon Martin.
The murder has stirred up intense conversations about race, necessary, painful conversations about race. Because George Zimmerman is a mixed-race Latino, (his mother is Peruvian, his father white) his race has been called into question in many ways throughout this process. Some people of color, and Latinos, have tried to minimize his Latino-ness. The right wing has tried to play it up, claiming that his mixed heritage means that race could not possible be a factor in the murder. Some have labeled him a “white Latino or hispanic.”
I felt personally very pulled by these conversations because I too could be put in a category with George Zimmerman. I am a light-skinned Latina. My parents are both immigrants from Cuba, but my mother’s parents immigrated to the island from Eastern Europe as Jews fleeing anti-semitism and persecution. My father’s side had been in Cuba for multiple generations.
Race is a complicated socially-constructed and politically-shaped reality. For Latinos in the US, this reality is very different than the reality we might experience in our family’s country of origin. People who would be seen as White in Latin America may be seen as people of color in the US. These categories are fluid, ever changing and also extremely important in shaping our lived realities.
I am not Trayvon Martin, and as someone who could be George Zimmerman, I have a unique responsibility to work against racism within communities of color, including Latino communities. It’s a responsibility that weighs heavily on me. It’s also one that I see as distinct from the responsibility of white people to fight racism.
My understanding of my own identity has been heavily shaped by my knowledge of the political history of race and racial justice organizing in the US. The term woman of color originated as a term meant to build solidarity between Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Native Americans in the US. Loretta Ross has a great clip I originally found at Racialicious that I often refer to:
You can read the transcript at Racialicious, but this is the part that is most important to me:
And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”
Now, what’s happened in the 30 years since then is that people see it as biology now.
Race is not a biological reality, it’s a social and political one. And that social and political reality differs widely depending on how you are read, how the world interacts with you. Because I am light-skinned, because I speak English without an accent, I walk through the world with relative privilege when it comes to race. But I also have a clearly marked Latino name. I may not even know how that has shaped interactions that happen virtually, or where my name is the first thing someone sees. There are many ways in which one can be racialized in this country, and that is why the term woman of color, or person of color, was employed—to build solidarity across groups, not ignore differences or presume we all have the same experience.
There is a great post at Black Girl Dangerous, by Asam Ahmad, further extrapolating on this in reference to Trayvon:
We are NOT all Trayvon Martin. People of color keep getting hella mad for being called out on white passing privilege, for being asked to hold themselves accountable to the ways they are not like Trayvon and more like Zimmerman. So many folks seem to be having a hard time acknowledging that this murderer was a Latino who had light-skinned privilege and played into the rules of White supremacy to get away with murder. The fact that so many white folks are identifying with him should tell you something: it is a marker of how some people of color gain access to the toxic privilege of passing for White, of choosing not to identify themselves as poc but coopting into the system of White supremacy instead. Sometimes we do this for our own safety but sometimes, obviously, we do it for other reasons altogether. These are all realities of this case, and they are realities of a hierarchy that accords privilege and oppression on the basis of the amount of melanin in our bodies.
Why do these facts make you mad? Why is it so hard to acknowledge that you have access to forms of privilege that Black folks simply never have? As poc we are so often taught to think of ourselves as oppressed and as nothing else. But oppression is not a static entity and it does not remain constant for all POC. How can this not be obvious to anyone paying the slightest amount of attention right now?
Those of us who are not Black need to be very explicitly clear about this: Trayvon was not murdered because he was a person of color. This verdict was not delivered because he was a person of color. Trayvon was murdered because he was Black. This verdict was delivered because he was Black. Given the amount of intense anti-Black racism that continues to circulate in non-Black poc communities, given the number of ways we continue to benefit from anti-Black racism, it is paramount that we do not forget this. To appropriate the specificity of this injustice, to attempt to universalize this travesty as one faced by all people of color is to perpetuate another form of violence. To not acknowledge the role and specificity of anti-Black racism in this whole charade is another form of violence. This murder and this verdict are very specifically about anti-black racism – about the power of White supremacy and about what it means to have a black body in a White supremacist society.
And our inability to acknowledge these facts are hurting Black folks and African descended folks right now. This is not solidarity. This is not what solidarity can ever look like. It shouldn’t be that fucking hard to sit back and listen to the grieving voices of black people in this moment. It shouldn’t be this hard to not get defensive and keep your mouth shut and just listen.
I’ve been heartened by this and other efforts, like the tumblr We Are Not All Trayvon Martin, have taken on to try and explain the difference between solidarity and appropriation, between allyship and silencing.
Personally, I’ve grown and changed in countless ways over the years in my identity and understanding of my role within the broader community of color. From refusing to write an accent on my last name as a kid and the inclination to be silent about my identity and how I see myself, to instead insisting on spelling out clearly where my privilege lies and what I see as my role, it’s ever evolving. I have big thanks to give to many mixed-race and light-skinned people of color for walking the journey with me.
I’ve realized in the many years that I’ve written this blog, I’ve often assumed my audience was predominantly white. That’s because the doula community is predominantly white, and the full-spectrum doula community I’ve met and interacted with is also predominantly white. I know I’ve been able to feel comfortable, or be welcomed into some of these spaces because of my passing privilege, and it’s something that I think about constantly.
I also know that for doula work to be truly radical, truly transformational, we have to center race as a key factor that shapes the experiences of pregnancy and parenting in this country. We have to talk about it politically, personally, in every aspect of our work. So I’ll start with my vulnerable place, my story, my experience.
This article in The Modesto Bee, authored by Corey G. Johnson of the Center for Investigative Reporting, shows what many of us have assumed: coercive sterilization is not a historical practice—it’s a present reality. While fights rage on across the nation to maintain our access to safe and legal abortion procedures, for some folks, the fight to maintain the ability to become pregnant, and parent those kids, continues.
These fights, primarily because they impact low-income folks of color, don’t get the kind of attention and resources that other battles do. There is racism and classism in this divide, and we have to do all we can to raise hell and attention for the ways population control efforts continue today in this country.
Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Former inmates and prisoner advocates maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targeting those deemed likely to return to prison in the future.
The article explains that the reason these procedures required state approval is precisely because of the history of coercive sterilization for incarcerated women. Court cases in the 1970s based on the discovery that Latina women in California public hospitals were being sterilized without proper consent led to a set of rules regarding how and when you can properly consent to a sterilization procedure (like a tubal ligation).
In order to obtain consent, you have to provide consent information and documents in the patient’s native language (Latina women were found to have signed papers in English consenting to the procedure, despite not speaking English) and you also can’t obtain consent during labor or delivery.
In addition, this article explains that federal funds could not be used to provide sterilization procedures to incarcerated folks because of fear of coercion.
From this reporting, which relied on the work of Justice Now, an organization working with folks on the inside to eradicate prisons, coercion is exactly what took place in many of these sterilizations.
One interesting thread throughout the article, which is distinct from the historical incidences of coercive sterilization, is the use of repeat c-sections as a medical rationale by the doctors quoted for these procedures. With repeat c-sections, they say, there is a risk of uterine rupture upon subsequent pregnancies.
The question there, of course, is why so many c-sections to begin with? I don’t buy it, and assume it’s just a medical attempt to cover up what is really a procedure pushed because of judgement about who should parent, and how many children someone should have, particularly someone who is incarcerated.
I increasingly get more and more infuriated about how little attention in the reproductive rights arena goes to the struggles of low-income, people of color trying to maintain their right to pregnancy, parenting and bodily autonomy. If you are truly doing reproductive justice work, than this issue should get as much attention as any abortion rights fight.
In the past few years I have heard over and over – usually from straight women – that the reproductive health movement should look to the marriage equality movement as a model for success. With the recent Supreme Court decisions around marriage equality, I expect to hear this now more than ever. And yet every time I hear this, I shudder. Not just because the marriage equality movement – one that has largely been led by wealthy, white gays – has been so problematic, but because it is being said in the face of an extremely successful movement led by undocumented youth, the overwhelming majority of whom are people of color, many of whom are also women, and many of whom are also queer.
She goes on:
It’s time that we paid attention to the forces behind movements’ political successes, and what that says about whom they are ultimately serving. It says a lot about the ways that racism plays out in progressive communities when a movement that has been led largely by wealthy white folks gets consistently named as the one to model – even when the demand is conservative, even when queer and trans folks of color consistently call out its racism, even when a successful movement led by those who are some of the most distinct targets of injustice in our society is under way. In mainstream reproductive health and rights circles, undocumented youth might get a few kudos, maybe some “they’re so brave.” But from there it moves on quickly, without further analysis, as though there were nothing there from which we could possibly learn. This has incredibly deep implications that go beyond just perceptions of success, but cut into reputability, access to funding and resources, and ultimately movements’ progress, sustainability, and survival.
I’ve had a lot of similar thoughts about witnessing the undocumented movement in the US these past years−the DREAMers, the NYSYLC, undocuqueer, the NIYA and many, many more. I’ve become friends with some of the folks involved, but mostly I’ve been in awe of their savvy and political influence. The fact that a group of young people, most of whom are not even constituents of the elected officials they influence (because they cannot vote because of their status) have been able to influence policy and political dialogue to the degree they have has been incredible. And this without most of the resources flowing to the more mainstream groups working on immigration. While there are a few non-profits set up to support the undocumented movement, the resources are minuscule in comparison to most. And let’s remember, of course, that many of the folks involved in this work can’t get paid to work legally in the US, which means that they likely aren’t getting full-time non-profit salaries while they are putting themselves into detention to help other immigrants inside. (To learn more about this aspect of their movement, last week’s episode of This American Life chronicled it.)
A few things that I think about this, in addition to the amazing analysis by Veronica.
One is that I question whether our current non-profit centered model of organizing and activism can ever truly fuel the kind of major change we know we need on many fronts. These organizations, while well-meaning and mission-driven, are in many ways simply tax-shelters for the wealthy. They allow people with resources to give their money away tax-free. The vast majority of the resources coming to non-profit organizations comes from private foundations whose wealth was accrued through private business (Ford, Hewlett, Gates). I question whether these funders actually want to do much to change the status quo—at least not in the more extreme ways some activist groups would want to. So the model of professionalized activism—still relatively new in many ways—may be fundamentally opposed to the kind of changes our movement wants to see. I realize this is not new thinking. So it’s no surprise that the movement with little to no institutional support is the one that actually has evidence of being successful.
The second thing I think a lot about is how the success of the undocumented movement has been based on the willingness of the individuals involved to put themselves on the line. Many of their actions center around civil disobedience, knowingly putting themselves at risk of arrest, and even in recent years purposefully entering detention centers as detainees to help the immigrants inside.
Remember, the vast majority of the folks doing these things are undocumented. Which means that a simple arrest for protesting, or taking over an elected official’s office, could mean deportation and the inability to come back to the US, ever. Talk about putting it all on the line. Now obviously these folks are smart, they work with good lawyers, and they know what they are doing. They take calculated risks, and many of the activists who’ve been arrested have also stayed in the US. But the possibility is always there. It’s why their work gets the much-deserved attention.
Are you willing to risk deportation, possibly to a country you haven’t lived in since you were a baby, for your movement? I don’t know that I would be willing.
The moments that we see the most effective activism, the most inspiring acts of courage and resistance, are often in the face of extreme challenge. What happened in Texas last week. What’s going on in North Carolina today as I write this.
It’s at times a crippling reality, this sense that change will never come from the institutions I hope can be responsible for fighting for justice. It makes me question my choices, where my time lies, how I make a living and what I think about my own activist contributions. But when I’m feeling hopeful, when I take a note from folks like Veronica, I think maybe we just need to be learning the lessons of our history. Maybe we can transform our world, inside of institutions and outside of them. Maybe we can learn how to be brave enough to take real risks, to put it all on the line, because even if we feel our little slice of life is protected, we know that it wouldn’t take much for us to lose it all.
I’ll leave you with another incredible video from the folks at SONG, who inspire me everyday with lessons about what transformational activism can look like (even within a non-profit org).
We offer this video as a love letter to our Immigrant communities, LGBTQ communities, and communities of color about our inter-connected destinies. On the Fourth of July, SONG knows real independence is inter-dependence. Real independence requires community beyond citizenship. For all those who live between and beyond borders of all kinds, this one is for you.
Radical Doula 