shackling of women during birth in prisons

h/t radical doula

from rh reality check

check out this article on giving birth in shackles.

Last month, a former Washington inmate sued the state for shackling during her birthing process and high-risk pregnancy, treatment that included a leg iron and a metal chain across her stomach.

Also last month, former inmates of Cook County jail filed a federal lawsuit in Illinois challenging the facility’s shackling practice. Illinois was the first state to have legislation that prohibited shackling; it remains one of four states that make shackling explicitly illegal.

“I had no idea women were treated like that anywhere,” said Tina Reynolds, who was shackled during labor and the birth of her son fifteen years ago.

“Shackling is a brutal and inherently unjust practice, so blatantly draconian,” said Malika Saada Saar, executive director of The Rebecca Project (and contributor to RH Reality Check).

“The problem is that policies for incarcerated men are extended to women without adapting to distinct circumstances,” Saada Saar added.

i am really glad to hear that the activists around this issue are framing it as a human rights violation.  that this is cruel and unusual punishment.  and that it is torture.

because that is what it is.  it is a practices that causes physical and psychological trauma to the mother as well as child.  someone in the article described it as ‘draconian’ and i kept imagining these medieval torture chambers.

what i have a hard time imagining is the justification for this practice.  really?  so that the woman doesnt escape incarceration.  something tells me that this was said by someone who has not gotten to experience the glorious miracle of labor.  ummm….in the middle of labor is the woman really going to have the energy to break out of prison?

Leaders in the anti-shackling movement credit the campaign’s momentum to centering the experiences of women who were shackled. Their stories are featured at press conferences, in letters, in briefs, and other campaign vehicles. Many are collected through Women on the Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH), an association of formerly incarcerated women founded by Reynolds.

“It may be possible to resist changes (to the practice of shackling), but when you’re confronted with the reality of women who’ve had to endure this, that’s a hard position to maintain,” said Rhoad.

i was thinking earlier that we dont center the voices and experiences of the marginalized simply because it makes us look good.  no, we (as community builders) do so not only because it is ethical but also because it is effective.

placenta medicine

After a woman has a baby, many changes quickly begin to occur in her body. Hormones revert to pre-pregnancy levels, organs shift and blood levels decrease – just to name a few. This transition can sometimes be difficult. Placentas contain hormones which, when given in the postpartum period, can make the change easier. Ingesting the placenta also can help to prevent postpartum depression. I have seen quite a few women who had postpartum depression with previous pregnancies take placenta medicine after a current pregnancy and feel completely different.

Placenta medicine also has nutritional benefits. It is a high source of iron and protein. Because the placenta is the bridge between mother and baby, it contains all of the same vitamins and nutrients that mother has passed across to baby. This may be especially important if a woman experiences postpartum hemorrhage.

~ Kelly Graff
Excerpted from “The Bridge of Life: Options for Placenta,” Midwifery Today, Issue 84

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The most practical method of processing the placenta is to dry it. This method has been and still is being used all over the world. Depending on the culture, the placenta is dried in the oven or in the sun. When the placenta is finally mummified after many hours, it will still need to be protected from bacteria and insects.

Traditionally the dried placenta is wrapped in a piece of cloth and hung in a cool, dry place to be cured like bacon. In a modern household, a preferable method is to grind it into a powder and keep it in a well-sealed jar in the refrigerator. The powder can then be used to produce various remedies.

The placenta must be completely mummified before being pulverized. The average placenta is 25 mm thick, has a diameter of 22 cm and weighs about 500 g. Depending on the size and thickness of the organ, an average of three days and three nights is required for it to dry enough to be broken into chunks.

The exposure to heat during the drying process should be as gentle on the healing substances as possible. Afterwards, the placenta will only be half its original size and will have turned hard and black. It needs to be brittle enough to be crushed into pieces with a heavy object.

First, grate the dry chunks of placenta, then grind with a coffee mill or with a mortar and pestle. Keep removing the powder and grinding the bigger pieces. If the powder is still not fine enough, add a carrier substance such as sugar, silica or mineral earth. The crystals of the carrier substance will make the powder even finer.

The completed placenta powder keeps best in a cool, dry place. The container should be marked with the date the powder was made, the dilution and the origin of the raw material. Experience shows that the powder can be stored for up to three years. If bacteria, spores or parasites are not destroyed, the powder will develop a bad smell. If this happens, do not use the powder anymore.

~ Cornelia Enning
Excerpted from Placenta: The Gift of Life, Motherbaby Press 2007

family christmas

1. i come from a traditional black southern christian family.  well really its more like a clan.  from northern south carolina.

its important to know where one comes from.  in order to know where one is going.

and after christmas 2006 i realized that where i came from was seriously messed up.  and where i was going was away.  far away.

2. i was 7 months pregnant.  visiting my family for the holidays.  habibi had stayed in minneapolis to work.

digging right now

stuff i’m digging right now

eat mangoes nekkid: by india who reminds us to: nurture yourself , its all very beautiful, regardless of the circumstances always find the bliss

what i have loved about her blog for the past couple of years is her celebration of her body, sexuality, food, movement, visual beauty.  frankly she has excellent taste in the pleasures of life and reminds us all to be grateful for that which is good.  she does so not from an annoying positive about everything and thus oblivious about most things but from a grounded spiritual love.  thank you india.

pomegranate queen: her poetry ‘raw and spontaneous’ on the screen.  exploring diaspora, longing, love…

synchronicity is fading i fear
i am fading
so i must stay up

i put on my headphones
i lay back i listen
and the boom bap the bass line remind me
of the sun

the people could fly: i am one of those lil black kids who grew up reading the people could fly: american black folktales…and i love the blog created in the name of this book.

5 sisters travel the world finding power and possibility in the stories, dreams, and lives of people-through an evolving American mYth-reality about Africans who fly.

stand and deliver: rixa’s blog on birth and midwifery is one of the best, informative, well-researched, good analysis, interweaving the person with medical.

forced sterilizations

i give much love to anyone who has had to make the difficult decision to have major surgery that has resulted in not being able to conceive a child.  that is an incredible decision.  for those of you who felt informed, and weighed the pros and cons and made your choices accordingly, you have my respect (as much as that may mean).

but since i first read about forced sterilizations of women of color by racist doctors in angela davis’s book: women, race and class, whenever i think about it i want to cry.  that choice to conceive and bring life into this world stolen from women—all i can say is that the universe’s blessings are manifold.

el compa sent me a link: reparations for eugenic sterilization in north carolina.

North Carolina lawmakers pushed Thursday to offer reparations to thousands of victims of a forced sterilization program now recognized as a shameful part of U.S. history….“Yes, it is ugly. It’s not something that we’re proud,” said state Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, who has been working on the issue for several years. “But I’m glad that North Carolina has done more than any other state to step forward and not run away from it.”…Rep. Ronnie Sutton, the Democratic chairman of the study committee, said because of the nation’s lagging economy, it may not be possible to fully fund the compensation program with an estimated $18 million that would be needed to cover all surviving victims. “Anything with money is going to have a hard road to hoe,” Sutton said. He suggested lawmakers may consider funding some of the program in the upcoming session to get it started and finish allocating money at a later date.

that is not enough money.  sorry, but it is true.  for all those who wanted children and had that potential for giving life cut from their very bodies, there is not enough money left in this world, to compensate you for what doctors, lawyers, state regulations have ripped away.

and even of the 18 million, that money is largely symbolic, you will not see most of it…and that makes me sadder.  they will use the current economic down spiral as an excuse to not materially compensate you (even a little) for what you had stolen from you in order to appease the powers of good, well-meaning, evil folks in this world.

a lil sisterist revelation

when i started reading midwife: sage femme, hebamme, comadrona, partera blog i thought she was of color.  thinking probably latina.  and then hours of reading later…6 or 7 pages into the blog, i found out that she was white.  i had to read the sentence 4 or 5 times to be sure…i am still in half-denial, like i really want to claim her as a radical woc.  but then i thought, no, it is awesome that she is white…frankly there arent that many white chicks that ‘get it’.  and when i meet (or read) one who does it gives me hope for sisterhood.  it reifies that ‘whiteness’ is not an adequate excuse to not struggle to be conscious in this world.  or for white folks to throw up their hands like: oh, there is no point in trying…

you know, sometimes life has a way of handing me some beauty.

and now…some articles/blog posts i am digging about birth.

after the birth what a family needs: this is for a friend who is looking at becoming a post-partum doula.  i think that she would be wonderful at it.

word magic: i have questions of anti-circumcision as a movement.  questions about respect for cultures and religions.  but i love this bit in this post:

She was shunned for many years for daring to speak up for the unassisted birth pioneers.  She loved being a midwife but didn’t do it with any compromise of her values.  She was fond of the idea that midwives should attend only one birth per month…She often said that “Every mother is a midwife” and then proceeded to further alienate herself from most other midwives by asking the rhetorical question “Why would I pay someone to be paranoid for me?”…Every profession needs someone to shoot straight from the hip and bring the profession back to a state of humility.

a balancing act

BEFORE

i am not a primitivist.  i do not romanticize the past simply because it was before now.  i do not believe in some edenic before when all went perfectly.  but i do have to ask the question: how the fuck did the human race propagate itself before doctors, obgyns, or certified licensed and insured midwives?

let me put it this way: what does it take to call yourself a midwife?

i imagine that 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 birth and knew the rituals, the songs, the calls that that community had developed around the emergence of new life into the world.  there was probably a well of community knowledge that could be dipped into held by various men and women in the community.  maybe some oral traditions.  maybe some drawings that acted as a guide and a recorder of history.  there were probably some herbs that were known to be helpful.  probably folks had watched other mammals give birth.

and they knew the particular women giving birth.  knew her temperment, her favorite foods, what her moods looked like.

when most ‘natural’ midwives say that midwifery is a calling found around the globe, i think this is who they have in mind: the mother, sister, aunt, cousin, grandmother, neighbour who came by and helped out.  the woman who had a knack.  who was in charge of gathering and drying the herbs.  the woman who took it upon herself to care.

this is the way birth is happening in a good many parts of the world right now.  as i type.

and yet the same ‘natural’ midwives will tell you how their craft is ancient and wise and sacred, based on the knowledge and lives and experiences of these aforementioned women, would be offended if that woman moved into their community and called herself a midwife.  hung a shingle outside her door.  and started attending births.

third/fourth wave midwifery and spinning babies

do you remember that democracy now! with melissa harris lacewell and gloria steinem talking about hillary and barack earlier this year?

it is one of the greatest exchanges that happened during the election imho.

it was the difference between second wave and third wave feminism…i know we are not supposed to acknowledge the difference between the generations approach to feminism…but i need the analogy to explain third/fourth wave midwifery…

well, alot of the midwives that i have met (primarily in minneapolis) are second wave midwives.  they have fought so hard for legal recognition that everything else becomes secondary or tertiary in their view.  and they are very protective over the ‘gains’ they have made, no matter how 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, and many more marginalized in the birth community and in the world at large.

what they seemed to be much more concerned with is protecting their status and the status of certified midwives in order to advance their cause.  they do so by looking toward women’s cultures that are black and brown and saying: see!  see!  those women have ‘natural’ birth.  and we, white women, are using those black and brown exotic women’s cultures as a model for us to change birth in our white communities.

unassisted childbirth

today i am going to hip you to the unassisted birth culture.  frankly, for all the strangenesses and weird alliances (can you say witches and fundamentalist christians sharing notes on childbirth?) i love this movement…and this blog has in large part been an exploration on the empowerment of women during pregnancy, birth, and mamahood and i believe that unassisted birth is a large part of that.

unassisted birth (a birth without birth professionals) is not everyone’s or most people’s imagined ideal birth scenario.  actually i was talking to my teacher from palestine a week ago and when i mentioned home births he said: people still do that?  ha ha ha.  but i do believe that in the core of our culture we need to know that birth happens.  it does not do so because of any professional or any machine, it simply happens because that is how the human race brings forth the next generation.  and that each of us has the right to decide what we are going to do with our bodies. we must decide for ourselves whether and how we are going to conceive, carry, deliver and  care for our young.  we must learn the ways that our body and our minds communicate to our person.  that the bodies intuition must guide us.  and if that intuition says scheduled c-section, then do it.  and if it says give birth in the woods next to a lake on a bed of mushrooms, do it. 

we do not live in a culture that honors this knowing.  and for those of us who seek this knowing without the vestiges and garb of patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, and other oppressions, it is harder for us, because we are going against the grain of ‘motherhood’.  our culture does not have models for anti-oppressive revolutionary pregnancy and birth.  and so we have added burdens (as if we do not have enough already) of creating these models, living these models, and sometimes, dying by these models.  these models which are so life-affirming and yet because they are so heretical to the ‘powers that be’ give our culture’s leaders permission to jeopardize our life and our children’s life in order to discredit these life-giving paradigms.  and yet we must continue to fight.  not simply for ourselves, or our children, but for the women who are looking for models…they must learn that they have the power to create their own. 

us ranks 29th in infant mortality rate

once someone asked me why did i think that infant mortality rate was so high in the u.s. i said that i thought that there was a lot more poverty in the US than most middle class people realized. that there are significant sections of the population that are living in the third world conditions in the US…

i have meant to post the little mosaic essay that i wrote for the revolutionary motherhood zine here on gmm, but havent gotten around to it…anyways it addresses the question (or raises further questions) about why infant mortality rates are so high in the us….

U.S. falls behind other developed countries in infant mortality

The United States ranks 29th. The rate has not improved because of an increase in premature births, health officials say.

By Mary Engel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 16, 2008

After a century of declines, the U.S. infant mortality rate barely budged between 2000 and 2005, causing the United States to slip further behind other developed countries despite spending more on healthcare, according to a report released Wednesday.

The rate was 6.86 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005, virtually unchanged from 6.89 in 2000. In 1900, the rate was 100 deaths per 1,000 live births.

The United States dropped to 29th in the world in infant mortality in 2004, the latest year for which data are available from all countries, tying with Poland and Slovakia. The year before, it was 27th. In 1960, it was 12th.

The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the leveling off in mortality to a 9% increase in premature births over the same period and to stalled progress in saving the earliest preterm infants. Premature birth and low birth weight are by far the biggest causes of infant death.

Advances such as prenatal steroids that hasten lung development and other treatments that help premature infants breathe have allowed the vast majority of those infants to survive.

But the search for new breakthroughs is only one part of the solution, said Joann Petrini, director of the March of Dimes’ perinatal data center.

“Several decades ago we saw really dramatic declines because we had these silver bullets,” she said. “But the other piece is to see how can we prevent some of these babies from being born preterm in the first place.”

Infant mortality rates vary by race and ethnicity, from a high of 13.63 per 1,000 births for African American women to a low of 4.42 for Cuban Americans, according to the CDC report. Differences in socioeconomic status and access to medical care did not entirely explain the gap, the report said.

A rise in twins and triplets, driven by the use of infertility treatments, contributed somewhat to the rise in premature and low-birth-weight births, Petrini said. But even accounting for those trends, premature births are increasing, possibly tied to rising rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

What those conditions have in common is that they are preventable, and that, said Petrini and other health advocates, is where the United States falls behind other developed countries.

“We as a nation place less emphasis on primary care and prevention than a lot of these other industrialized democracies do that have lower rates than we do,” said Dr. Ann O’Malley of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington-based research group.

Twenty-two countries have infant mortality rates below 5 per 1,000 births, and Sweden, Norway, Finland, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are below 3.2.

Health advocates acknowledge that many of those countries have more homogeneous populations than the United States. But they also have fewer gaps in healthcare coverage and health systems that emphasize primary care.

“We’re great in this country at taking care of really sick people with high-tech interventions,” O’Malley said. “But we’re not very good at plugging people into preventive care.”