[Seattle-editorial] FP: Rouge Midwifes

[BFGalbraith]

Anderberg e-mailed this, in the context of putting it
up on the site.  I would like to post it as a feature.
 (It's strongly reccomended reading FYI, one of the
most intense stories I have read in a long time):

> 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!


=====
-Benjamin 

"BFGalbraith"- bfgalbraith at users.sourceforge.net 
(H&S Project Manager- http://hack-and-slash.sourceforge.net)
Galbraith Games Website- http://www.squawkrpg.net/news
Why I am looking for another e-mail service:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com