Rogue Midwifery: Birthing
Babies on the Sly
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 (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,” (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 (www.midwiferytoday.com
), and Midwives Online (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 (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.
Kirsten Anderberg
is the mother of a draft-aged son, an activist,
feminist comedian, and prolific journalist/writer.
She discusses police accountability, midwifery,
accommodating vegetarians at winter holiday
events, teens' rights to political dissent,
street performance, medicinal uses of stinging
nettles, and much more. You can find her articles
in Infoshop.org, Alternative Press Review (altpr.org),
Utne.com, Zmag.org, Adbusters Magazine, Hipmama.com,
Slingshot Zine.
Here's a link to many of her articles: angelfire.com/la3/kirstenanderberg/