Basically, the bill that has passed the Mississippi State House would outlaw the practice of any midwives that aren’t nurses.
There are many ways to learn midwifery, including the excellent programs completed by CPMs, which include traditional schooling as well as apprenticeship.
We need MORE midwives in this country, not less.
If you live in Mississippi, the Big Push for Midwives has details about what you can do to stop this bill from passing.
I’m speaking at a great event next week in NYC, at Barnard College. If you are in NYC, you should check it out.
It’s a panel with Mary and Lauren, the two other co-founders of the Doula Project (and current coordinators!) as well as Aishia Domingue from the Brooklyn Young Mother’s Collective. It’s going to be an interesting conversation.
Reproductive Justice in Action
Aisha Domingue, Mary Mahoney, Lauren Mitchell, and Miriam Pérez
Panel Discussion:
Wednesday, 3/3, 6:30 pm
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard HallThis panel will feature a group of reproductive justice activists and birth doulas who work across the spectrum of pregnancy, birth, and women’s health, connecting the traditional reproductive rights movement with new social justice activism that considers the complete physical, political, and economic well-being of girls and women. Birth doulas, as trained sources of physical, emotional, and educational support, work to empower women and support their reproductive choices. How does childbirth fit into the discussion around reproductive rights, a discussion that is often based around access to abortion and contraception? How can the reproductive justice framework help us consider institutional barriers, such as racism and poverty, that have limited women’s empowerment and decision-making when it comes to their reproductive health?
I’m also speaking at a couple of other places in the next few weeks, including Smith College, University of Iowa and University of Minnesota. Check out the details here, and if you’re interested in bringing me to speak email me.
I have another piece up at RH Reality Check today. Apparently it’s my week for publication! This one has a lot more opinion and snark than yesterday’s. I was responding to the recent efforts on behalf of the anti-choice community to argue that abortion is being used by groups like Planned Parenthood as a form of eugenics against women of color.
Latinas and other women of color don’t need to be protected by paternalistic ideologues motivated by a political agenda that disregards the needs of women of color and their families. So thanks for your concern, anti-choicers, but I think the women of color advocates working within the reproductive justice movement have got it covered. We’re working in those clinics you attack, we’re helping to shape policies and provide services in our communities, services that allow us to decide what our needs are.
We know whom we can trust to make decisions about family creation: women themselves. We don’t need limits on what services we can access. And we don’t need your ideological bullying.
The next time one of your crisis pregnancy centers, one of your dramatic billboards, or one of your bogus pieces of “sex and race selection” legislation actually works to support women through whatever choice they make for their families—we’ll talk.
Read the rest here.
My newest article is up at RH Reality Check. This time I took on a topic I knew very little about. What I discovered is that surrogacy is extremely complicated–morally, ethically and legally. It’s also not being worked on by very many reproductive justice organizations, and should really get more of our attention. It is the concern of some right-wing conservatives though, and they are having an influence on how surrogacy court cases are playing out.
Surrogacy is a complicated subject, to say the least. It involves many of the issues central to reproductive justice—bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to abortion, definitions of parenthood, and custody of children. It’s also an option increasingly relied upon by gay couples—usually gay men—to create families. It invariably brings up concerns about racial and economic justice when the majority of surrogates are low-income and many are women of color. It’s an issue on which few reproductive rights and justice groups are currently working but one that deserves our close attention.
A recent and closely-watched ruling on surrogacy by New Jersey Superior Court Judge Francis Schultz contributed to the hazy patchwork of court cases and legal precedence that guides how surrogacy is now dealt with in the United States.
The U.S. is one of the few countries worldwide to have neither federal laws nor federal legal precedent restricting surrogacy, making the ease of surrogacy arrangments relatively attractive for couples who can not bear children. But the landscape is mixed. Some states’ laws and legal precedence completely contradict those of other states. What has resulted is an entirely unregulated surrogacy industry, with the majority of activity occurring in the few extremely permissive states.
Go check out the rest here.
Via RH Reality Check, a new bill to legalize the practice of Certified Professional Midwives (non-nurse midwives) looks like it has strong support in Wyoming.
Woot!
Jos at Feministing has the full story, but it deserves mention here as well.
Basically, midwives who were practicing at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital received a letter in the mail telling them they could no longer deliver there, and instead had to deliver at a facility 11 miles away. The reason cited was the lack of NICU at the Valley Hospital. More details here.
It’s such a shame that the few midwives that do practice in the US (and put up with the challenges of being in a hospital run by OB-GYNs) have to deal with crap like this.
Also,a related side note/rant. On Jos’ post at Feministing, all the comments decided to attack my assertion that the increased rate of maternal mortality in California might just have something to do with the double in the number of c-sections.
It amazes me that even the readers of a feminist website would go to such lengths to defend c-sections. I’m not anti c-section. But 30% and rising is way too much. Also, apparently, only “self-serving doulas” think that elective, non-emergency c-sections are not the best way to give birth.
If you’re feeling feisty, head over to the post and join in the comment conversation.
We are Brooklyn, New York–based independent producers developing two film projects about doulas who have dedicated themselves to working with pregnant incarcerated people. We are seeking to meet women who would like to share their stories and experience in order to raise awareness on the issues these people—both the doulas and the women they seek to serve and advocate for—face on a daily basis. If you are a part of a group starting or maintaining a prison doula program in your state, we would very much like to hear from you.We look forward to meeting you. Please contact: monipeterson@gmail.com.
Kindly, Laura Sweeney & Monique Peterson
Just wanted to post a quick link to a great interview with doula and director of the film Orgasmic Birth: The Best Kept Secret, Debra Pascali-Bonaro.
It doesn’t get much more radical than the idea of orgasmic birth.
Read the interview at Stand and Deliver, check out their website, and you can even pre-order the book written the film creators.
A new investigative report released by California Watch reports that maternal mortality rates in California have seen a spike in recent years, almost tripling in the last ten years.
To me, there is one clear cause of this kind of increase, and that’s the c-section rate, which according to California Watch have increased 50% in the same decade in CA.
The World Health Organization recommends a c-section rate of about 10%. We currently have a national average of 30%. In some hospitals it’s as high as 90%.
C-sections are major abdominal surgery. There are risks involved, and with so many c-sections, you’re going to start having deaths as a result.
We need less c-sections. Period.
The other thing this report revealed was that there was significant increase in maternal mortality among non-Hispanic whites, a group traditionally excluded from maternal mortality and low infant birth weights. Well again, this is probably because of the c-section rates, which might even be higher among this group than women of color.
The idea that increases in technology use could actually harm women, rather than help them, is impossible to believe for the OB-GYN community:
When researchers unveiled their initial findings to a conference of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 2007, there were gasps from the audience, according to participants at the San Diego event. The idea that California was moving backward even in an era of high-tech birthing was implausible to some.
This is exactly the point. Overusing technology it’s just as harmful as under-utilizing it. The bottom line is that OB-GYNs are trained as surgeons, and their dominance of maternity care is proof of that–they are performing more and more surgeries than ever.
We need practitioners who are trained to care for women birthing without technology, namely midwives. Technology has a role, but it should be the exception not the rule. And let’s be clear here. It’s not just c-sections that are to blame. It’s also increasing induction rates, epidurals and other medical interventions that disrupt the process and are more likely to cause interventions.
“For every maternal death, there are 10 near misses; for every near miss, there are 10 severe morbidity cases (such as hysterectomy, hemorrhage, or infection), and for every severe morbidity case, there is another 10 morbidity cases related to childbirth,” Camacho wrote in an e-mail.
Chally of Zero at the Bone included a post from Radical Doula (about the shackling of incarcerated pregnant women in PA) in the latest Carnival of Feminists.
Go check it out! It’s an awesome thematic round-up of some of the best feminist blogging out there.
Radical Doula 