by LJ Martin - janesearing.wordpress.com

I just wanted to acknowledge that I haven’t written in a while.  It’s been a productive time, but one in which I have not found much space for the formation of ideas into good words.

That is shifting now.  I can feel the wheels turning and the ideas starting to flow.  I’ll be back here shortly.

Sometimes it’s good to pause.

But what comes up for me is a pure visceral emergency response, like I’ve been kicked in the gut.

It strikes me that this is because of how much my own parenting is learning that lives in my flesh. I gave birth at home, without drugs, felt every exquisite inch of it.  My youngest and I nursed exclusively for the first 6 months, nursed after work and through the night for the next 2 years.  I also nursed my older son (from my partner’s womb) for a short time finding a few quiet moments with toddler and infant simultaneously at peace. We  co-slept with both of them exclusively the first year (thus fostering the nighttime nursing). After that we put them to sleep in their own beds - though they continue to find their way to our bed at various times of the night even now (they’re 6 and 8).

So parenting is lodged, like our sense of smell, in the deepest parts of our primordial brain.

I think all parenting lives there, regardless of how it comes to you and manifests. And I think this at least partly explains the tensions that arise between people with different parenting styles and experiences. And how those tensions then, also find their way into moralizing from courts and communities.

These are deep issues, childbearing and family making, informed by culture and belief but ultimately rooted in our most basic senses and impulses. Our closest relationships are learning that lives in the flesh too.  When we are confronted with difference in these intimate places it’s as offensive as a foul smell, a rotten memory from the “emotional brain.”

In fact, the inspiration for this post came when I realized that I have a similar visceral response to people who have never experienced great sex. To consider the thought makes me woozy and erects a wall between us that I must fight to transcend. Similarly, some of my spiritual experiences are so embodied that the doubtfulness of skeptics blinds me with a fight-or-flight fury.*

My point is not that you should have great sex, nurse your baby, meditate ecstatically, or have a natural birth (though I highly recommend it!).  My point is that these experiences live so reactively within our flesh that we should question our reasoning abilities when it comes to them, question all ideas formed in response.  (Consider this recent court decision to terminate the parental rights of a mother who refused an unnecessary c-section - reasonable?)

We shouldn’t deny reason, just put it in perspective: so we can try to understand ourselves and each other more fully, so we can reason through our reaction to difference like we can reason through our reaction to bad fumes - without making moral or legal judgments on that basis alone. (Consider this post about sniffing).

Ultimately, acknowledging how our spiritual, familial, and sexual learning lives so limbicly within us might also build new alliances where there are now mostly hostilities.  So the devout might better appreciate the sex-radicals and the queers, and the queers might better appreciate the devout and the breeders, and the wisdom of those on the edges might finally find voice.

*Notably, sexual and spiritual experiences are less public than parenting, so these incidents happen less frequently, but no less acutely. In fact, often, the silence around sexual and spiritual learning/living also feels like an affront.

One of the things I respect most about the midwives I have seen in action is their ability to listen deeply to birth and discern whether things are ok, or not.  This is notable, because a lot can seem ‘not ok’ during birth, and because what is ‘ok’ is not necessarily what is desirable.  It’s not an easy task to keep an eye on birth like this.  I think discernment is an apt description because it’s more like perceiving clearly without judgment, than it is about knowledge or certainty.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the hard parts of life.  Sometimes, the hard parts are deeply empowering, as I discussed in my post “Birth as an Opportunity for Life Not Just Survival.”  But other times, the hard parts erode our sense of ourselves, disempower us, diminish.  Naturally, we want to protect ourselves from that which diminishes us.

I write from a place of deep gratitude for the discernment of people like my midwives, and my dad, who helped me experience the empowering hard parts of life when I might have otherwise, turned away. And I write from the position of abundance and protection that comes from having said yes.

This turning away that has captured my attention lately. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” where a looking away from shared experience amounts to pornography.   Taken broadly, turning away from that which is empowering but hard, ends up demeaning us, and is ultimately a form of abuse.

It’s not that I blame the myriad women who in the face of the challenges of labor, birth, breastfeeding, parenting - turn away. We all have to negotiate our own lives.  We learn from our miscalculations, from our turning away. We learn this discernment, this ability to perceive without judgment that which will enliven and grow us, versus that which will destroy us.

The real systemic damage is done when people are deprived of the opportunity to learn that discernment.

This is what medicalization of birth does because it applies science too heavily where art is more apt. Add to that our culture of convenience and efficiency and it amounts to a culture of abuse, diminishing people who give birth, diminishing the wisdom and power of families, privileging the “convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally accepted and the merely safe.”*

A friend of mine said today that it has to do with resources, that sometimes, we have to turn away when we know we don’t have the resources to say YES to the hard stuff and be ok.

We recently got our kids their first pet.  Within the first day it became clear that the potential for heartbreak and disappointment was high.  I realized how if this experience went badly, they might decide that engagement is not worth the risk, it might shut them down to the point that they turn away.

I guess it’s true that it has to do with resources.  How strong are their hearts?  How safe to they feel? How adept is their thinking, their discernment.  To what extent can they peek over the top of their living and see themselves as part of a bigger whole? But how can they have those resources if never allowed to find that edge?

I also have a friend who is in the first week post-partum. She is exhausted.  Her baby nurses constantly.  It’s very unlikely that it will kill her.  More likely, she will “grow beyond whatever distortions [she] may find within [herself].”  But I know it’s hard there, especially if you don’t have support, if you’re alone, if you don’t have the resources to be on your knees and still be ok.

Who is to say what will diminish her? What will empower her? Or my kids. Or her kid. The truth is, no one can say, no one can know in the hard parts of life, what will lift us up versus what will tear us down.  That is far too confusing a line for me to see even in my own life, where so often what breaks me down is what lifts me up.  How dare I imagine that I could judge for another?

But this is where discernment comes in.

Sometimes, because of our position, or role, or relationship we are invited to peer into another’s life, to bear witness to their erotic power - erotic in the sense that Audre Lorde describes, “the nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”

In these moments of heightened connection to this well of knowledge (birth, death, sexuality, love, loss) it is all the more important that we do not turn away.  It is the witnesses job to hold space, keep our eye on things, perceive without judgment and peer over the top of this living and see the bigger whole.  I take this as my duty as a social midwife, helping to give birth to a new way. Discernment is a tool and a remedy.

Another friend was recently describing her experience with domestic violence.  She was married for over twenty years to a man who systematically erased her connection to the “nursemaid of her deepest knowledge,” her guiding light, her ability to negotiate her own life.  Although he did severe damage to her body, it is this damage to her discernment that was most damning.

It strikes me that the same is true when it comes to childhood sexual abuse.  The abuse is not necessarily in the sexual exchange itself, but in the turning away that becomes like a black hole, suffocating child and adult, making discernment impossible. These places where discernment is impossible, where the parties involved no longer have the resources necessary to say “yes” to the hard but enlivening stuff, much less “no” to the self-depleting, these are places where oppression lives and breeds.

Abuse comes from the failure of the witness to honor their erotic power and deepest knowledge, their discernment. It is not that we should deny the erotic power of children, or our own erotic power as their caretakers.  Honoring our erotic power makes us more responsible to ourselves and more capable of acts against oppression.

A lot can seem not ok, and what is ok might not be desirable.

In the practice of discernment that midwives and Audre Lorde teach me I know that turning away is riskier than holding space, that we need channels within which to grow “beyond whatever distortions we find within ourselves,” and that connection and joy are better measures than pleasure, safety or convenience.

These are principles that should be woven into our relationships, our parenting, all healing professions, and all systems of human governance.

The abundance that comes from having discerning witnesses, from having said yes, is an abundance that does not require a new budget or trillion dollar debt, but it is an abundance that when claimed necessitates our connection, our shared joy, and our humanity.

* quotes are from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

Here is the text of the poem:

On Ressurection Day your body testifies against you.
Your hand says, “I stole money.”
Your lips, “I said meanness.”
Your feet, “I went where I shouldn’t.”
Your genitals, “Me too.”

They will make your praying sound hypocritical.
Let the body’s doings speak openly now,
without your saying a word,
as a student’s walking behind a teacher
says, “This one knows more clearly
than I the way.”

A friend who read my blog came away with the impression that I think the experience of birth is more important than the outcome, meaning that I would advocate for risky but meaningful births, or deny that death is worth avoiding.

This is a common misperception. More than just wrong, it expresses the limitations of this culture’s understanding of birth as a dangerous impediment to life.

To some birth might be good, it might be bad, it might be traumatic, it might be empowering, but at the end of the day if birth results in a mother and child who survive, it is successful. In my experience as a labor doula, this is an attitude I witnessed all the time in the hospital from nurses, doctors, anesthesiologists, and family members.

In this understanding of birth, survival is success and labor is the inherently risky passage that stands between the life promised by pregnancy and the intact bodies delivered at its end.

In many places around the world birth IS dangerous, many women die and even more are injured in ways that compromise their lives. The United Nations Human Rights Council just adopted a resolution recognizing maternal death and illness as a human rights issue.

Some would interpret this tragedy as evidence that survival ought to be the top priority, that because labor is an inherently risky passage anything that minimizes that risk is better than the riskiness of labor unchecked.

I agree that women are needlessly suffering and dying as a result of childbirth. But instead of locating the tragedy in the natural process of women’s bodies, I locate the tragedy in poverty and the devaluation of women’s lives. This devaluation is cultural, religious, economic, interpersonal, internal - pervasive.

Anything that fails to address the pervasive devaluation of women’s lives is the real tragedy. This is why I cannot agree that any birth that results in survival is a success, or that survival should be the exclusive top priority.

To survive in a context where your existence is disparaged, where you have no options, where your body is valued only to the extent that it can be used, is also a tragedy.

And this tragedy is reinforced when labor is viewed as the inherently risky passage that stands between the life promised by pregnancy and the intact bodies delivered at its end. In this view, women’s bodies are still valued as a means to an end, and this risky passage is cut away from women as if diseased. This kind of cultural surgery might promote survival, but it does not affirm life, especially women’s lives.

To illustrate the difference between what is survival and what is life affirming, a story about mountain climbing:

Next year my dad turns 60, and to celebrate he wants to climb the highest mountain in Colorado. My eight year old son is already planning to join us, he knows that I climbed one of the most challenging 14ers in Colorado when I was his age.

I get choked up thinking about him on that mountain next summer, challenged to his core, challenged at a level he can’t even conceive of yet. I think about his little body, about the large and unforgiving mountain, about the very real riskiness of his ascent. And I realize that inviting his participation is not risking his life, but affirming it. By inviting him to do something challenging, something hard but beautiful, I renew my commitment to him, my belief in his wholeness, his capacity for and worthiness of life.

This is a gift that my dad gave me when I was eight and over again in many ways throughout my life. Climbing Longs Peak in the middle of the night as an eight year old is inherently risky. And yes, I survived, but in that risky passage I was more alive than I had ever been. The hike taught me the difference between life and survival, taught me that I was powerful, profoundly vulnerable and ultimately capable.

During labor, I had a similar sense of perspective: I felt terribly vulnerable and at the same time immeasurably important. I was excrutiatingly aware that I could die, and that this life that pregnancy promised was more of a hope than a guarantee.

I did survive. And so did that beautiful baby. But I was ready and willing to die for the journey, just as I have been time and again on the face of a mountain. The journey is life.

And when women’s lives are valued, labor offers itself as a life affirming inherently risky journey that’s an honor to be be invited to consider. We don’t need childbirth to experience this fullness of life, but it’s here, built into the landscape like the glory of those snow-capped peaks that make no guarantees.

Childbirth, like the landscape, can be unforgiving and harsh, or it can be empowering and fulfilling. Much of this depends on the terms of engagement. For many women in the world, birth is not an opportunity, but a requirement mandated by custom, religion, and biology.

Today, in the United States despite infant and maternal health statistics that leave a lot to be desired, most women and babies survive. Some survive because of intervention during that risky passage called birth, but most survive because they have been able to escape the crushing impact of poverty on the bodies of women and children.

Instead of having a cultural understanding of poverty and the devaluation of women as risky, we have a cultural understanding of birth as risky. And somehow, instead of understanding that our distance from poverty and our access of our human rights is what promotes our survival, we have an understanding that our ability to intervene in labor is what promotes our survival.

This places the blame for death on women’s bodies, and also ends up making it seem as though impoverished women and families were to blame for their own suffering.

Instead, as the U.N. finally recognizes, when women die and are injured as a result of childbirth it is a human rights issue. Yes, we should protect the bodies of women, yes, survival is an important condition of life. We should do what we can to honor the lives of women, as my father has.  The journey of childbirth should be an invitation first and foremost. When it is it can also be a celebration of our power and vulnerability, indeed, a true celebration of life.

When I talk about the experience of childbirth it is not meant to take pregnancy out of context, but rather, to insist on its context.

When I talk about seeing the sunrise from the keyhole on Long’s Peak it is made all the more beautiful because of the context; I have chosen to participate in the beauty of life, I am small, the mountain is large, my body aches, and I am grateful.

When we take birth out of context - where the passage of labor is an inherently risky opportunity to be affirmed, acknowledged, valued, and capable - real damage is done not only to survival, but more importantly, to life.

This week a striking statistic crossed my path - families without paid leave have higher rates of infant mortality.

I have to let that sit for a moment so you can soak it in.

I’ve been meditating on this for 6 days not yet ready to find the words, even now I stop short to choke on the anger.  This means that families who can’t afford to take time off to care for each other end up not being able to care for each other.  And guess what?  We fare better in life when we can take care of each other!!!!

Ahem.

In terms of priorities, this is one of those stark moments when the veil is lifted and the butt-naked embarrassing truth is revealed, and is not pretty.  Our priorities are upside-down and backward. Even when we try to address the problem of infant mortality head on, like through SIDS campaigns, and prenatal care, and research into how and why babies die, one of the most comprehensive, efficient, fair, and effective options alludes us: make sure that we each have what we need to take care of each other. It’s too elegant and simple to be true.  Maybe we don’t need more high level hospitals, or high tech drugs, or new technologies to prolong life, as much as we just need each other.

And I don’t mean to be simplistic. I don’t.  I don’t mean to be one of those commentators who takes data all out of context and out of proportion. This information just emphasizes that social and economic forces impact our health and sustainability. This, when compared to other information, can make my thinking bulge in ways that distorts context and proportion, so, excuse me.

For example, this week, a U.S. district court judge decided that a woman who was being held in custody for having fake immigration documents should not be released (despite federal sentencing guidelines and the recommendations of the prosecutor).  Instead, she should have double the recommended sentence. Why? Because she was HIV positive.  And pregnant.

Let’s just imagine for a second that being in jail during pregnancy is a good thing, let’s just imagine that it’s a certain sort of ‘paid time off’ that will allow this woman to provide for herself and her baby in ways that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. It’s almost like state resources are being made available to the less fortunate! Almost. Of course we have to assume things about this woman’s life, like her inability to take care of herself and her family.  And we have to accept that her liberty is not integral to her well being.

If social and economic forces impact our health and sustainability, how will being jailed, and disempowered BY THE STATE, impact our health and sustainability?

Hmmm…

Another item that came to my attention this week is that racial disparities in health care continue to exist.

Women of color fare worse than white women in various ways, to varying degrees, in every state.  In some states, the disparities are much smaller: which can mean that all women fare well, or all women fare equally poorly. Either way, this too emphasizes the fact that social and economic forces impact our health and sustainability. Since race is almost entirely a social construct more than a biological reality, this report points out that the root of those disparities is something cultural, something man-made.

Families without paid leave have higher infant mortality rates.

Families that are not white have higher infant mortality rates.

Families that are in generally impoverished areas, regardless of race, have higher infant mortality rates.

What if, to help stave off the detrimental health outcomes by infusing state resources, we imprison families without paid leave, and families that are insufficiently white, and families that are excessively poor?

Oh.  Yeah.  We are…

Of course, I mean “radical” here as in “affecting the fundamental nature of something” because giving birth and dying are not radical in the “departure from tradition” sense of the word.  It should be a clue to our profound deviation that recognizing the fundamental nature of birth and death has become such a departure from tradition.

What inspires me about birth and death as sites of cultural struggle is that our life-force is in spades there, in birth and death we have the capacity to be deeply connected to what Audre Lorde describes as our erotic power.*  I like to use that phrase because it taps in to a core hunger that we can all lean into and revel in.   And we need that core hunger activated to reclaim our birthing and dying.

When we institutionalize these threshold moments we institutionalize our life force. Can you imagine conscripting your erotic power to an undertaker?  And yet that is what so many do.  While most people in the United States want to die at home only about 30% do (and only 1% of us give birth, or are born, at home).

This movie exposed the myths that lead so many to believe that they can’t die or care for their loved ones in death without the aid of institutional services.  We don’t need to be embalmed (in fact it’s better for the environment if we’re not).  We don’t need fancy caskets (send me to the light in a cardboard box that we all decorate like a love-package).  We don’t need funeral directors (I want Muppets, poetry and silly hats!).  We can even hang out at home after we’ve died for a few days while everyone soaks in the reality that our souls are no longer housed in our bodies.

And what’s more, this is deeply, deeply healthy for our individuals but also for our shared ecology. Not only the ecology of living and dying things, but also the ecology of culture and ideas.  We are cookie-cuttered in packaged funerals and packaged births. Our communal erotic power is spent like so many loveless pornifications depleting our creative reserves.

But when we die and give birth at home, among loved ones, when we care for these bodies on the threshold with our own hands and hearts (fearful, cracked open, in awe as we may be) we celebrate our erotic power, give birth to ourselves, release the life force, palpable, into the air we breathe.  We become the air we breathe.

——————-

* Audre Lorde “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider.  She defines the erotic as “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it we know we can aspire” and in my paraphrasing: An internal requirement towards excellence which does not demand the impossible, but rather invites us into a fullness and depth of feeling that necessitates that we honor ourselves by not settling for the convenient the shoddy the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Some resources on Home Funerals and Death:

Final Passages in California

Crossings in Maryland

Funeral Consumers Alliance, a federation of groups.

Natural Transitions in Colorado

and Dying a Natural Passage by Denys Cope

And then I think about the relative who has been calling me more, and I think it’s because he has disappointed and offended the rest of my family too much recently, and I’m a safe bet. Makes me think about the kind of companionship that comes from decades of bouncing off the same soft walls of family together: distance, proximity, alienation, recognition.

Just read this post about a mom who wanted to have a natural labor, and breastfeed, and found childbirth and parenting anything but how she expected it; ended up a bottle-mama, felt the pangs of derision calling out from magazine covers touting “Breast is Best.”  Had the opposite experience with her second, found joy and derision there too.  She has visited both worlds and finds some sense of comfort in the undefined gray where most of parenting lives. Speaking of  that gray gets me thinking about Rev. Renita Weems’ recent ponderings about the power of dads, and how that fits with my chosen-niece’s dad-free family, and my own kids’ four parent variety (and the nuances of gender and roles it creates).

And I’m considering the question posed by queerradical when he wonders whether there is really anything radical about poly-kinky sex and invites us to create spaces for collective sharing of sensuous skills. This, against the backdrop of a recent Massachusetts bill that aims to protect the disabled by making sexual images of certain adults with disabilities illegal, members of the disability and sexuality performance troupe Sins Invalid are not so sure that the  law would protect them.

Which reminds me of how much trouble one can get in mentioning breastfeeding and your own kids in boxers within the same few lines that you mention kinky sexuality.  And maybe rightfully so, because those same soft walls of family have done some serious damage to folks in the way of sexuality: distance, proximity, alienation, recognition.

And yet here we are.  Brought together. Bonding in all sorts of inexplicable ways.  Embodied.  Here we are embodied.

I meditate on that quite often. So many times I have said to myself “but I have a body, I still have a body.”  I dismantled my whole sexuality, deconstructed all attachments I had built up for myself even around my supposedly liberated radical poly kinkiness.  I took it all apart like so many lego pieces scattered out on the floor in front of me.  And it was awesome.  And now sometimes I see myself like a shell cracking open and myself, light-soul-essence flowing out.  But when I went to reconstruct the pile, it still pretty much amounted to the same me.

As Catholic feminist theologist Mary Hunt says, “Bodies Don’t Lie.” And if that’s the case, what do we know about how we bond? How our bondings continually ebb and flow, wax and wane, except - do they ever really die?  And what does that tell us about the meaning of life?

Haven’t seen my partner now for what feels like days, I’ve got to go show her the suitcase, what I have packed, and then sit down to enjoy a little LOST before she’s off for the weekend.  In the meantime, I’m still tinkering with the legos…

In the United States 7.4% of women ages 15-44 are infertile (and almost 12% have impaired fertility). Worldwide, infertility seems to range from 3-10%.

But these numbers are intended only to suggest scope.  For someone who tries and wants to bear children but can’t, the numbers don’t matter much, the sense of loss is personal.   In some parts of the world the consequences are severe, women who can’t bear children may be abandoned, stigmatized.

As someone who got pregnant easily, without complication, and who also focuses on childbirth as a site of personal and social change reckoning with infertility and other experiences of life that do not include childbirth are essential to fully exploring this territory of birth-bonding-death, toward a theory of life.

Though I am in no position to offer perspective on the lived experience of infertility, I humbly ask for insight from those who can, and who might also seek to protect the farthest reaches of childbearing without adding insult to injury for those who grieve. (This applies also to those who grieve childbirth experiences that were traumatic or disappointing, who live with disabilities,  and in a different way to those who raise their own children through adoption, or choose not to bear children.)

I am convinced that the machinery of our childbirth culture which threatens birth-bonding-death also stigmatizes infertility, childlessness, adoption, disability and sustains the trauma that it seeks to relieve.  So I am interested in breaking down barriers here so that we might better see our alliances and work together for our humanity.

Briefly, two components of that machinery are a resistance to death*, and the concept of normal.

In terms of birth, resistance to death shows up in the risk-based assessment of care, the focus on pathology, increased c-section rates, electronic fetal monitoring, litigation for infant mortality, and even in the avoidance of grief that people who’ve had traumatic births regularly hear “at least you have a healthy baby.”

This last comment signals the problem of normalcy, which is not so much about what is normal (”a healthy baby”) but is rather about a sort of standardization of bodies and life experience (characteristics XYZ=healthy baby).  In birth, standardization confines what is perceived as “safe” within arbitrary parameters, and limits what is possible from our bodies and souls.

The discomfort with grief and loss as a part of life (death) and standardization of our bodies and experiences effects us all regardless of childbearing by turning us into citizens “whose actions are governed through the exercise of [our] own capacity to choose in accordance with the norm(al).”  (quoting from Shelley Tremain in “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero”)

I’ll leave you with that provocative notion and my humble request for insight from those with different experiences of childbearing than mine (acknowledging that there is way more to be said about death, risk, safety, standardization, normalcy, and our shared responsibility for it all).
——–
* it occurs to me that it’s not just a resistance to death but a sort of fetishizing of death based on denial-that-gives-the-denied-excessive-power.

What struck me first in reading this article was the gap between the perspective of this author (that the Somali pirates are local patriots, protecting their people) and authors of more mainstream press who portray them as “shrewd businessmen and daring opportunists.”

Similar is the gap between home birth activists/practitioners and medical practitioners like members of the the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Medical Association (AMA).   During the “Midwife Debate” that went on from 1916-1935 midwives were called “poor, black, dirty, illiterate, immoral, immigrants, drunken, ignorant, superstitious, callous, rough, criminal, relics of barbarism.”

Today it’s not much different. These groups portray midwifery like the American press portrays the Somali pirates: through imperialist eyes. To them, midwives are the enemy, the “other,” and they have to be diligent in the protection of their interests. For over a century the AMA has worked hard to police the boundaries of their profession, making sure that those boundaries are ever expanding, include the most profitable territories, and are unsurpassed in power. In the summer of 2008 these groups even passed resolutions proposing that home birth be outlawed.

On the flip side, midwives, and their clients have found their boundaries constrained, their territory occupied, their indigenous vilified (or worse) and their power limited to guerilla tactics - like the Somali pirates. Especially in this country and especially among people of color and immigrants (among whom today, you will find very few midwives). Imagine if, among the trials that new immigrants in this country faced, they at least knew that they had the power, authority, and wisdom to take care of their new families, to usher in new life in their own culturally relevant ways.

One hundred years ago, they did. Most of the midwives in this country were immigrants, and in fact, many of the American born doctors learned from these immigrant midwives about birth. I could go on and on and you can read more about this history in Judith Pence Rooks encyclopedic Midwifery and Childbirth in America, the point is that the European-Medical expansion into this territory - serves the same imperialist purpose as the European exploitation of African resources.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies defines imperialism as having several interlocking parts: economic expansion, subjugation of others, a discursive field of knowledge, and a spirit that gets represented in myriad ways. This expansion into the realm of childbirth has all of these elements, as does the recent piracy example.

Economic expansion: the newly professionalizing doctors had an economic imperative to define and protect their turf. Subjugation: today 99% of the people born here are born in a hospital, 98% of them under the care of a doctor - that’s almost a complete power reversal. Discursive knowledge: in addition to the resulting power shift, entire fields of knowledge have been written over, today the vast majority of birth is medicated, few people even know what an unmedicated natural birth is like. And the spirit: today, immigrants feel it is a mark of progress to be born in an American hospital (although health stats make such high regard questionable), midwives and pirates alike are seen as archival, mythological, backward…

This is why the political stakes are the same, it has to do with territories and resources, dignity and humanity. The contested sites differ, the discursive knowledges too, but in the end, we will have no justice without addressing imperialism in all of our labors.