Outlaw Midwives: A Manifesta
LIFE AND DEATH
Every child will not be born alive or may die in infanthood.
Early motherhood is the interplay of life and death and sometimes filled with sadness and loss, with joy and sweetness.
Always death is interwoven in to the fabric of the living moment. Cells reproduce and die like the rhythm of breathing, like the opening and closing of a gate.
We center, not simply the biology of birth, but relationships we have with people we take care of and those that take care of us.
And mourn daily the dead and the missing, the actions of our governments and other powerful entities that kill and maim babies and mothers, the destruction of resistance communities’ next generation. That destruction privileges many of us with resources allowing us more reproductive choices.
The pro-life movement focuses on birth control and abortions, we go deeper. We ought to be able to decide when, and how we will conceive and with whom, who and what practices will be part of our pregnancy, what we allow into our body, where we give birth and with whom, how we feed our children, etc. Our intelligence, agency, and subjectivity are central. The health of the next generation depends on the psychological, physical and spiritual health of the mother today, our levels of stress, support networks, confidence and joy.
MEDICAL VIOLENCE
The medical system’s structural and physical violence denies us the full expression of our agency. Doctors and nurses routinely manipulate information for the convenience of the medical system and its workers. They force us to have strangers’ hands, medical instruments and machines on our body, to undergo unnecessary and dangerous procedures such as hormonal birth control, surgery, genital mutilation and sterilization, experiment on our bodies and psyches, verbally threaten the ours and children’s lives, lie to them, and sexually harass and abuse us with little impunity. They deny us our basic human rights, humanity, moral expression, personal and communal wisdom, cultural understandings of body and being, full access to the power of reproduction and creation, and our connection to our children, loved ones, culture, kinships and cosmos.
In order to realize resistance and liberatory revolutionary communities that care for all their members, we co-create respectful spaces for folks to make their decisions about their body, family, communities, life and death.
NATURAL AND NORMAL CHILDBIRTH
The concept of ‘natural’ childbirth or lifestyle is dependent on the concept of the ‘artificial and that the ‘normal’ birth concept is dependent on the existence of the technological and medical models of birth. So natural/normal birth did not exist before modern western birth culture.
Mostly pregnant middle and upper class educated white women have the economic and racial privilege and choices to have a ‘natural/normal’ birth. These women, a small segment of the global birthing world creates their natural experiences by exoticising, fetishizing, imitating and co-opting the practices and images of 3rd world brown women childbearing cultures. Natural/normal concept is really code for ‘preferred’, it is the elite white women who have the preferred childbirth and normal body. Their body, lifestyle, childbearing, mothering, and inevitably, their children set the standard through their privilege and access for what is normal and natural.
It’s not about ‘natural’ birth, vs. medical interventions vs. Cesarean. It is about empowerment.
Many midwives in the West have fought so hard for legal recognition for their craft that all other considerations about birth have become secondary or tertiary. The privileging of ‘certified’ and ‘insured’ midwives has been not only negligent but destructive to women of color, the queer community, sexual and trauma survivors, imprisoned women, folks with disabilities and many more marginalized peoples in the birth community and in the world at large.
Imagine for most of human history midwives were just women who had given birth or were the sister or the mother or had been around for births and knew the rituals, the songs, the calls that that community had developed around the emergence of a new being into the world. Perhaps a well of community knowledge held by various men and women in the community. Some oral traditions. Drawings that acted as guides and recorders of history. Helpful herbs. Folks had watched other mammals bring forth their young. Most likely they knew the particular woman giving birth. Her temperment, her favorite foods, her moods.
They were the mother, sister, aunt, cousin, grandmother, neighbour who came by and helped. The women who had a knack. Who were in charge of gathering and drying herbs. Who took it upon themselves to care.
We cannot afford to romanticize the past, nor believe in an edenic before, but this is the way birth still is happening in a good many parts of the world right now.
Right now 300,000 women are giving birth. Most of the babies will live. A few will die.
It is a joyful sad knowledge.
A LACK OF EXPERTISE
We are not the authority, nor the expert. It is that lack of authority and expertise that is our greatest strength. We know what we know, do not claim to know more than we know, and we follow the birthing person’s leadership.
A community is only as empowered as its mothers.
Before the beginning of human history, human beings have controlled their reproductive lives. Folks found leaves, roots, sap, smoke, dance, prayers, animals and more that helped to regulate fertility and those processes continue to this day. They choose persons and processes that honor their reproductive lives. And we are willing to break the law and go to prison to honor and empower the mother, the child, and the community.
It can be difficult to receive that training and apprenticeship when doors refuse to open because we are from a marginalized community. Access is not solely (or even primarily) dependent upon our passion, ethics, intelligence, or dedication. We get all the training that we can. Teach each other. Read everything we can. Talk to everyone who will talk to us. Develop a strong intuition with our own bodies, minds, lives, with the universe. We never stop learning, because the more we know, the more that we can offer. But we don’t deny folks the right to choose for themselves what kind of pregnancy, birth, and child caring they want. We explain to folks what we know and what we don’t know and let them make their decision.
CREATING REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNITIES OF LOVE
We envision anti-violence safer communities where mothers and children heal from reproductive violence, because it is when we are whole and confident in our own leadership, are we able to co-create healthy communities.
Communities in which commitment to a mother’s choice is 99 percent of being a midwife and in which we define ‘motherhood’ as love by any means necessary.
Communities in which we care for ourselves developing spiritual and physical awareness so that we can hold the space, the energy, the vision for folks to make decisions that center freedom, community and revolutionary love.
We must mother ourselves. Hold ourselves the way that we hold our children. And know that our wisdom is stronger and more knowledgeable and relevant than outside expertise. We must live the lives that are given to us. And trust others to do the same. For the sake of our survival. For the sake of our ancestresses. For the sake of our communities. For the sake of love.
I truly appreciate that the writers of this blog recognize white privilege and race issues that effect the labor experience. Keep writing.
[…] midwives, which uses phrases like “revolutionary communities of love.” There’s a manifesta, and I’m still processing it. There hasn’t been anything new in a while, it seems, but […]
[…] the beginning of the outlaw manifesta… Every child will not be born alive or may die in infanthood. Early motherhood is the […]
important and timely commentary. I’ve had win interests/passions for natural home birth and for global social and environmental justice since my adolesecnce in the early 1970s. would like to read and dialogue more on these and related issues. keep posting as time permits!
oh! check out my blog: guerrillamamamedicine.wordpress.com to find me posting about birth and other junk regularly… 😉
Truly beautiful. We must talk.
[…] are more suggestions and info at the outlaw midwives site. The outlaw midwives manifesta is also an excellent read. Deadline is May 15Th! […]
As a community midwife, and spiritual director, I’ve worked tirelessly to promote and defend the kind of “folk midwifery” and contemplative birth practice I believe, based upon experience and intuition, results in “a good birth”. I am simply aghast at what the “professionalization” of midwifery is doing to promote a single standard of midwifery care for women and agree wholeheartedly with your concern about marglnalized women and families who need community-based care and aren’t getting it. I have written and spoken intensively about the white, middle/upper middle class orientation of the current home birth midwifery model even when affixed to some kind of charitable intentionality about “Haiti Midwives” or the “African Birth Collective” which seem to be viewed by American birthworkers as clinical placement services available to go “get my numbers for NARM” than as places where they can serve their sisters in birth. I too, have struggled with taking on the role of peacemaker and human rights activist by doing more “doula” births for the majority of women who are birthing in hospitals. I’m somewhat disgusted by the nonchalance of women who work exclusively in home birth, promoting and defending it as “the norm” with a long list of “shoulds” attached for women and families from everything about how to “set up” their homes for birth, which “birth pool” to rent or buy and what women “should” eat, or not, during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. All of this assumes, of course, that women have homes, or resources for food and all of it IS assumed by women who’s sole contact with birthing women is found in the suburbs or in rural parts of the country where women have not only large extended families but strong community support and help. I find it ludicrous that workshops, classes, herbs, homeopathy and “birth jewelry” are all marketed and promoted as part of the “picture” of home birth–resources, energy and endless amounts of time devoted to helping the women on the planet who have the most—have more.
Congratulation on your fine work here; you have my complete and wholehearted support. Well done. Michelle Wilbert,BA,Midwife and Doula ~ Close to the Root Midwifery and Perinatal Support Services
yes yes yes…
and this:
double yes.