[Seattle-editorial] Rogue Midwifery: Birthing Babies on the Sly

[sheelanagig at juno.com]

Rogue Midwifery: Birthing Babies on the Sly
By Kirsten Anderberg
www.angelfire.com/la3/kirstenanderberg, also on Infoshop.org

Women helping other women deliver babies is as old as humanity. It makes
sense. So why do mainstream doctors and hospitals act like midwifery is
some radical, dangerous, medically-irresponsible quackery? In
Scandanavia, the UK, and the Netherlands, female midwifery is a thriving
occupation. Yet in America, it has been constructively outlawed as a
profession, for 100 years. While I was in labor, during my home birth, I
actually asked the midwives, “Are you sure this is okay to do at home,
and not in a hospital?” They said, “Kirsten, think about it. THIS is the
way women birthed for thousands of years before doctors and hospitals.”
That made sense, but I had to ask, due to my years of American medical
brainwashing. 

My midwives were rogue outlaws, in many ways. They fully understood the
political activism involved, they fully appreciated the anarchist nature
of what they were doing. They birthed approximately 200 babies in the
Seattle area, between the years of 1980 and 2000, and they did so with no
licenses, and no medical credentials. They delivered my baby at home,
illegally, and I am eternally grateful. When I gave birth in 1984, there
were no hospitals allowing midwives to birth in them, no insurance plan
would pay for a midwife, and Swedish Hospital was the only hospital in
Seattle “experimenting” with birthing rooms. There were no single or gay
mom childbirth classes, so I quit going to childbirth classes, as they
were filled only with middle-class, heterosexual couples. One of my
midwives, Miriamma Carson, was bisexual, spoke fluent Spanish, was a
radical activist and feminist, and she offered me a safe place, when
nowhere else felt safe. For $300, I was given private childbirth classes
with other single moms, and pre/post natal exams, as well as a 30 hour
labor and home birth attended by two midwives. When I had trouble paying
it, Miriamma let me barter cooking dinners for her kids instead. I could
never have afforded such superior health care under the status quo,
for-massive-profit, medical system.

Both of my midwives, Miriamma and Barbara R., had sons living at home
while they were midwives. And they helped homeless teens often. One night
Miriamma’s son woke her up at 3 am, saying he had stumbled on a teen
girl, in a car, behind the 7-11, in labor. She would not leave with him,
so he asked her to wait, and said he would send his radical midwife mom
to help her. Miriamma grabbed her birthing kit, and charged out the door
towards the 7-11. Miriamma delivered the baby, in the car, in the middle
of the night, with dignity, no questions asked. The girl refused to leave
with Miriamma, but Miriamma invited the girl to her home, and gave the
girl her home phone number before she left. I am wildly impressed by
this. Some would say that was irresponsible of Miriamma, and that she
should have called the cops, or CPS, or forced the mother into a
hospital. But Miriamma understood the difference between trauma and
empowerment, and via her gift of birthing assistance without authority
trips, she often saved women unnecessary trauma, allowing the joy of
birth to prevail.

Once Miriamma had a woman who only spoke Spanish, in labor, in her car,
trying to drive her home for the birth. They got stuck in a traffic jam.
Miriamma called her nearest friend and told her to prepare a room in
their home for a birth. She got off at the next exit and drove to the
friend’s house, where the woman had a healthy birth. Miriamma spent years
living in poor Mexican villages, and she knew there had been mass
marketing of corporate baby formulas in Mexico, as well as in the U.S.,
shaming poor moms away from breastfeeding. So Miriamma asked the friend
whose house they had landed at, to start breastfeeding in front of the
new mom, who just delivered, to set a positive tone for breastfeeding.
Miriamma was very good at finding healthy ways for moms to learn from
each other.

These midwives were also incredibly gifted at networking. They led me to
Doctor David Springer, one of the first M.D.’s to graduate from John
Bastyr’s Naturopathic College (http://www.bastyr.edu/), with an N.D. He
became one of Seattle’s finest holistic health pediatricians and took
grand care of my son for 18 years. They hooked me up with La Leche League
(www.lalecheleague.org), when I had breastfeeding problems. They taught
low-income moms about the WIC program. They facilitated safe homes for
domestic violence victims. They arranged safe abortions when asked. As a
matter of fact, Miriamma took me to a safe abortion clinic, when I asked,
years before she attended my birth. She bought the equipment abortion
clinics use, and hid it in her basement, when she feared abortion may
become illegal again. Miriamma is from a long line of radical women who
saw access to safe birth control, abortion and delivery, as a woman’s
right. Emma Goldman took formal training in midwifery in 1895, and was
saddened by the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, as a matter of
fact. 
 
Long have the fields of midwifery, women’s health care, witchcraft, and
feminism, been associated. In the article, “Witches, Midwives, and
Nurses,” (http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/witches.html) by B.
Ehrenreich and D. English, they say, “Women healers were people's
doctors, and their medicine was part of a people's subculture. To this
very day women's medical practice has thrived in the midst of rebellious
lower class movements which have struggled to be free from the
established authorities. Male professionals, on the other hand, served
the ruling class…Witch hunts did not eliminate the lower class woman
healer, but they branded her forever as superstitious and possibly
malevolent.” Calling self-help, preventative and traditional medicine a
“radical assault on medical elitism,” traditional healers named
"King-craft, Priest-craft, Lawyer-craft and Doctor-craft" the “four great
evils of the time,” according to the article. By the 1840's, medical
licensing laws had been repealed in almost all of the states. But by the
1900’s, racism was also playing into the sexism, classism, and medical
elitism, and since it was mostly immigrant and poor women who were having
and assisting home births, white women of the Victorian brand, were
asking for the white male doctors in sterile hospitals for birthing help,
not poor immigrant midwives with birthing experience and herbal
knowledge. And elite, white, women doctors, such as Elizabeth Blackwell,
turned on the women midwives too. The article says in 1910, 50% of all
babies born in America were delivered by midwives. And although
traditional medicine was primarily a political and economical issue, the
mainstream medical profession tried to say it was a medical and/or
scientific issue. The medical profession has attacked the autonomy of
midwives as health care providers, yet DIY women’s health care continues,
as a liberating force. 

When I was about 20 hours into labor, I started wimping out, and asked to
go to a hospital for drugs, as I was exhausted, and sick of the pain. But
my midwives reminded me that if I went to a hospital, the midwives would
be locked outside, I would be forced to do a lot of authoritative things
I would want to rebel against via doctors, and it could end up in a
C-section. Those threats kept me at home trying to birth naturally, which
finally did happen. And I am so thankful for them talking me through it.
Miriamma died in the mid-1990’s, due to cancer. It was an emotional loss
for the community. Her memorial had a cast of hundreds. Woman after woman
bore witness to how Miriamma saved her life when in crisis, giving her
dignity and comfort, when many of us had felt like “untouchables.”
Whether we were homeless teens, battered wives, single welfare moms, gay
moms, Spanish-speaking moms; we were all welcome on earth, according to
Miriamma’s open-arm policy. We all deserved superior health care. We all
deserved safe births and breastfeeding without stigma. Due to these
beliefs, my midwives were two of the most radical anarchists I have ever
met.

My friend Beth, in Santa Cruz, Ca., gave birth to her daughter, at night,
on the sand, at the beach, with the help of her friend/midwife Moon
Maiden. Birth is a tremendously powerful event and being drugged in a
sterile hospital with paternalistic doctors is not the ultimate birth
experience for many of us. Many of us want to birth, with our friends and
families, in nature, without drugs. And such freedoms around birth are
barely legal, if at all. So rogue midwifery continues on, under the radar
of the mainstream, as political activism, as feminism, as alternative
health care. Even with the recent advent of birthing rooms and licensed
midwives, this field is a rogue one at best. Even mainstream midwifery
resources, such as Midwifery Today magazine
(http://www.midwiferytoday.com), and Midwives Online
(http://www.midwivesonline.com) have a very anti-authoritarian tone. 
Doctors are not women’s bosses, and radical midwives understand this.
Groups such as the Radical Midwives group
(http://www.radmid.demon.co.uk/) in the U.K., see midwifery as a
political issue, as well as a health issue. Midwives have been doing this
as long as humans have existed. No laws can change it.
 

________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!