Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth edited by Julia Chinyere Oparah and Alicia D. Bonaparte
Now available in hard cover and paperback - SECOND EDITION COMING SOON!
BWBJ’s anthology shares deeply moving stories by black women about giving birth and childbirth activism. This book will transform forever the way you think about childbirth!
There is so much that we can learn from the wisdom of Black midwives, doulas and activist mamas. Disproportionate numbers of preterm babies, and infant and maternal mortality are not inevitable. Women can experience childbirth as a powerful, healing and sacred moment, rather than one of disappointment and even trauma. But we need to take action to challenge the inequities in our maternal outcomes. Help us to take Birthing Justice on the road, so that together we can build a movement for Birth Justice!
Birthing Justice invites you to learn from black women birth warriors and to make change happen in your family, community and world.
Book reviews
““Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth is a truly original and innovative book — and an absolute necessity in the current field of research on reproduction. With an interdisciplinary range of authors that also includes activists both within and outside the academy, the book demonstrates the important relationship between feminist scholarship and feminist activism.””
““At last, a book that places the experiences of Black women at the center of the debates about childbirth. Mixing activist, scholarly and personal perspectives, this book reclaims the history of black women as active agents in their birthing experiences, and deftly critiques the unwanted and questionable interventions that women throughout the diaspora have been subjected to, while inspiring readers to push for social change.””
““Midwives value ‘going where the women are,’ and that is very much what this book has done – South Carolina and North, Zimbabwe, Canada, the South Bronx and Florida; Neonatal intensive care units, operating rooms, radiology suites and birth centers, HIV Clinics and bedrooms – this book takes us to all of them. And the women – they are mothers and midwives and doctors and nurses; they tell their story, a quilt square tells their death; they stand as women or as the still-rare pregnant transman. And the pain and the strength of what it means to be Black and pregnant is written on every page. A long-awaited, much needed book!” ”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword, Shafia Monroe
Foreword, Jeanne Flavin
Introduction: Beyond Coercion and Malign Neglect: Black Women and the Struggle for Birth Justice
Julia Chinyere Oparah with Black Women Birthing Justice
I Birthing Histories
1 Queen Elizabeth Perry Turner: “Granny Midwife,” 1931–1956
Darline Turner
2 Regulating Childbirth: Physicians and Granny Midwives in South Carolina
Alicia D. Bonaparte
3 Between Traditional Knowledge and Western Medicine: Women Birthing in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
Christina Mudokwenyu-Rawdon, Peggy Dube, Nester T. Moyo, and Stephen Munjanja
II Beyond Medical versus Natural: Redefining Birth Injustice
4 An Abolitionist Mama Speaks: On Natural Birth and Miscarriage
Viviane Saleh-Hanna
5 Mothering: A Post-C-Section Journey
Jacinda Townsend
6 Confessions of a Black Pregnant Dad
Syrus Marcus Ware
7 Birth Justice and Population Control
Loretta J. Ross
8 Beyond Silence and Stigma: Pregnancy and HIV for African Diasporic Women in Canada
Marvelous Muchenje and Victoria Logan Kennedy
9 What I Carry: A Story of Love and Loss
Iris Jacob
10 Images from the Safe Motherhood Quilt
Ina May Gaskin and Laura Gilkey
III Changing Lives, One Birth at a Time
11 Birthing Sexual Freedom and Healing: A Survivor Mother’s Birth Story
Biany Pérez
12 Birth as Battle Cry: A Doula’s Journey from Home to Hospital
Gina Mariela Rodríguez
13 Sister Midwife: Nurturing and Reflecting Black Womanhood in an Urban Hospital
Stephanie Etienne
14 A Love Letter for My Daughter: Love as a Political Act
Haile Eshe Cole
15 New Visions in Birth, Intimacy, Kinship, and Sisterly Partnerships
Shannon Gibney and Valerie Deus
16 I Am My Hermana’s Keeper: Reclaiming Afro-indigenous Ancestral Wisdom as a Doula
Griselda Rodriguez
17 The First Cut Is the Deepest: A Mother-Daughter Conversation about Birth, Justice, Healing, and Love
Pauline Ann McKenzie-Day and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
IV Taking Back Our Power: Organizing for Birth Justice
18 Unexpected Allies: Obstetrician Activism, VBACs, and the Birth Justice Movement
Christ-Ann Magloire and Julia Chinyere Oparah
19 Birthing Freedom: Black American Midwifery and Liberation Struggles
Ruth Hays
20 Becoming an Outsider-Within: Jennie Joseph and Florida Midwifery
Alicia D. Bonaparte and Jennie Joseph
21 Beyond Shackling: Prisons, Pregnancy, and the Struggle for Birth Justice
Priscilla A. Ocen and Julia Chinyere Oparah