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In industrialized society, the birthing process has changed more in the past one-hundred years than in the past one-hundred-thousand years. This research examines the association between racial politics and the ways it influences reproductive politics. It exposes the birthing medical industrial complex in the US that has resulted in a devastating loss of communal ownership over birth for women of color. This thesis chronicles the struggles and triumphs of twelve Chicana women as they choose to remove themselves from the hospital setting and begin to give birth at home.
Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples. For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman—the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath—exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma. Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples. Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
This book will explore the childbirth process through globally diverse perspectives in order to offer a broader context with which to think about birth. We will address multiple rituals and management models surrounding the labor and birth process from communities across the globe. Labor and birth are biocultural events that are managed in countless ways. We are particularly interested in the notion of power. Who controls the pregnancy and the birth? Is it the hospital, the doctor, or the in-laws, and in which cultures does the mother have the control? These decisions, regarding place of birth, position, who receives the baby and even how the mother may or may not behave during the actual delivery, are all part of the different ways that birth is conducted. One chapter of the book will be devoted to midwives and other birth attendants. There will also be chapters on the Evolution of Birth, on Women’s Birth Narratives, and on Child Spacing and Breastfeeding. This book will bring together global research conducted by professional anthropologists, midwives and doctors who work closely with the individuals from the cultures they are writing about, offering a unique perspective direct from the cultural group.
"This book makes a compelling contribution to the field of Indigenous and maternal studies. The editors have put together a powerful collection that honours the spirit of pregnancy and birth, and the strength and resilience of Indigenous women and families"--Page 4 of cover.
Birth as every woman would like it to be • Recommended by Lamaze International as one of the top ten books for pregnant women and their families • Includes a 45-minute DVD of six live gentle births • More than 32,000 copies sold of the original edition New parents are faced with a myriad of choices about pregnancy, labor, and birth. In Gentle Birth Choices Barbara Harper, renowned childbirth advocate, nurse, former midwife, and mother of three, helps to clarify these choices and shows how to plan a meaningful, family-centered birth experience. She dispels medical myths and reimagines birth without fear, pain, or violence. Harper explains the numerous gentle birth choices available, including giving birth in an independent birth center, at home, or in a hospital birthing room; finding a primary caregiver who shares your philosophy of birth; and deciding how to best use current technologies. She also provides practical advice for couples wishing to explore the option of using a doula or water during labor and birth to avoid the unwanted effects of drugs and epidurals. The Gentle Birth Choices DVD blends interviews with midwives and physicians and six actual births that illustrate the options of water birth, home birth, and vaginal birth after a prior Cesarean section. The DVD clearly reveals the strength of women during childbirth and the healthy and happy outcome of women exercising gentle birth choices. It is a powerful instructional tool, not only for expectant parents, but also for midwives, hospitals, birth centers, and doctors.
Breastfeeding. The mere mention of it has many mothers wracked with anxiety (how will I manage with work, other kids, what if I don't make enough milk?) or guilt about not doing it (will I be hurting my child if I choose not to breastfeed? what will people think of me if I choose not to?). This hot-button issue is one we've talked about repeatedly in the media and in celebrity culture. Remember when Angelina Jolie posed for the cover of W nursing her newborn? Oh, the controversy! And when Barbara Walters complained about the woman breastfeeding next to her on a plane? She was forced to issue a public apology. Or what about when supermodel Gisele Bunchen declared that there should be worldwide law that mothers be required to breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life? All hell broke loose. This topic gets people riled up, and there has never been a narrative account that explores the breastfeeding big picture for parents and their children in today's world. THE BIG LETDOWN by author, journalist, and breastfeeding advocate Kimberly Seals Allers will change that for the better and open up a candid conversation about the cultural, sociological, and economic forces that shape the breastfeeding culture and how it undermines women in the process.
The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.
Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf. Undivided Rights presents a textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color. The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement—strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women’s organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on "choice." Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.