guerrilla mama medicine:
i wish i could just spend my time writing about black american southern midwifery tradition.
and what does it mean that anarcha was a south carolinian slave who was tortured so that the practice of gynecology could be born.
and how much does the villification of midwifery as dirty, uneducated,…
"Happy M/Other's Day!" by Trevor MacDonald
“I gave birth to my baby, but I’m not a mother—I’m a transgender man.”
Racial Breastfeeding Disparity Disappears at Baby Friendly Hospitals | Best for Babes
One of the biggest issues in breastfeeding is the disparity in breastfeeding rates among different races.
The gap between African American women and women of other races, while closing, remains the most salient example. The breastfeeding initiation rate of African American moms, which in 2007 was 60%, compared to the overall U.S. rate of 75%.
But it turns out that a big part of the solution is right in front of our noses. It’s evidence-based care and following proper infant feeding protocol, neatly packaged as the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, which forms the basis of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative.
Evidence is accumulating that not only does following the Ten Steps improve breastfeeding success rates in general, it actually eliminates or significantly reduces race-based disparities.
Support The Radical Doula Guide
It’s a political primer to doula work as activism, and how being a doula connects to and must take into consideration things like race, class, sexuality, ability, immigration status and much, much more.
Madonna and Child Project, by Kate Hansen
(TW for stories at link: Pregnancy, childbirth, infant loss)
(via outlawmidwives)
J. Marion Sims is called “the Father of Gynecology” due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure.
He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women.
Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid.
Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way.
Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.
Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his “practice” on enslaved infants.
Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.You guys should really google him.
(if you click the link, I did it for you)
(Source: thespunkywallflower, via outlawmidwives)
First queer birthing symposium! April 28th!
