Birth Work as Care Work

Alana Apfel

Description

Birth Work as Care Work presents a vibrant collection of stories and insights from the front lines of birth activist communities. The personal has once more become political, and birth workers, supporters, and doulas now find themselves at the fore of collective struggles for freedom and dignity.

The author, herself a scholar and birth justice organizer, provides a unique platform to explore the political dynamics of birth work, drawing connections between birth, reproductive labor, and the struggles of caregiving communities today. Articulating a politics of care work in and through the reproductive process, the book brings diverse voices into conversation to explore multiple possibilities and avenues for change.

At a moment when agency over our childbirth experiences is increasingly centralized in the hands of professional elites, Birth Work as Care Work presents creative new ways to reimagine the trajectory of our reproductive processes. Most importantly, the contributors present new ways of thinking about the entire life cycle, providing a unique and creative entry point into the essence of all human struggle—the struggle over the reproduction of life itself.

Sujets

• Reproductive justice
• Political economy
• Feminism
• Doula

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629632612
• Langue: English

Extrait

I love this book, all of it. The polished essays and the interviews with birth workers dare to take on the deepest questions of human existence.
-Carol Downer, cofounder of the Feminist Women s Heath Centers of California and author of A Woman s Book of Choices
This volume provides theoretically rich, practical tools for birth workers and other care workers to collectively and effectively fight capitalism and the many intersecting processes of oppression that accompany it. Birth Work as Care Work forcefully and joyfully reminds us that the personal is political, a lesson we need now more than ever.
-Adrienne Pine, author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras
This book places the doula-as a caring birth activist-at the heart of reproductive care work in our modern society. Doula, a new name for an ancient traditional role, reappears today as women daring to reclaim their power through birthing and caring for their children.
-Val rie Dupin, cofounder and cochair of the Association Doulas de France
All we are doing in this world is living and dying, creating and destroying. We generate new life in our children and in our ideas. Becoming a birth supporter, getting to be an attendant to the miracle of childbirth, has transformed my social justice work. Our visions for justice are what we are birthing in this world. Learning to listen, learning to trust the body and the people, and learning to breathe will transform our movement work. Birth Work as Care Work demonstrates these lessons through showing us ways we can learn together to support the birth of new worlds.
-Adrienne Brown, coeditor of Octavia s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
Alana Apfel is an artist and a robust one. Weaving the logic behind birth, care, and reproduction together, Birth Work as Care Work documents how caregivers and communities are marginalized in society on a daily basis whilst working to sustain themselves and ironically, to sustain life itself. Her thesis seeks to put the human back into being.
-Chitra Subramaniam, editor in chief of The News Minute
Alana Apfel s nuanced Birth Work as Care Work moves us away from a choice narrative to an understanding of the need for justice based on a politics of care work. The book will be a necessary movement builder because of the honesty and complexity of the wisdom spoken.
-Susan M. Reverby, professor of Women s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College
Against an infinity of individualizing self-help books on birth and mothering, this anthology outlines a politics of birth through multiple voices. Birth is a central moment in the lives of collectives, involving a variety of participants and possibilities for change. Breaking with the invisibility and undervaluing of the reproductive sphere, this book shows what collective life and social movements can learn from birth in relation to labour, care work, community, and mothering.
-Manuela Zechner, the Nanopolitics Group
Whether in the hospital, at home, or in the jail, doulas lovingly support the mom throughout the entire experience and into the postpartum period. Birth Work as Care Work powerfully demonstrates this through testimonies of birth experiences and in discussion of diverse aspects of the work. A must read.
-Maddy Oden, doula and executive director of the Tatia Oden French Memorial Foundation

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.
Series editor: Andrej Gruba i
Kairos books:
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities by Alana Apfel
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers, Israeli Ultranationalism, and Bureaucratic Torture by Smadar Lavie
We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway

Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities
Alana Apfel
2016 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-151-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016930964
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD Loretta J. Ross
PREFACE Victoria Law
INTRODUCTION Silvia Federici
A BEGINNING
Birth Worker as Activist
Birth Story
Organizational Practice
LABORS OF BIRTH WORK
The Co-created Interview
Jodi Koumouitzes-Douvia
Kelly Gray
Laili Falatoonzadeh
Cynthea Denise
Yania Escobar
Molly Arthur
Jewel Buchanan-Boone
Sophia Perez
TALES FROM THE BIRTH FIELD
Anika
Lucy
Madison
Oliver
HERBS FOR PREGNANCY, BIRTH, AND BEYOND
The People s Medicine
Herbal Tonics
Herbs for Milk Production
Herbs for Swollen Breasts and Sore Nipples
Herbs to Combat Stress and Nourish Vitality
An End and a Beginning
A POLITICAL DICTIONARY
Terms, Concepts, and Organizations
Bibliography
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
NOTES
For my mother, who gave me birth
Acknowledgments
This book was made possible through the support and contribution of many incredible people. Thank you to my teacher and friend Andrej Gruba i for putting an early version of this book forward for publication. Thank you to everyone from PM Press who helped make this happen: Ramsey Kanaan, Romy Ruukel, Gregory Nipper, John Yates, Jonathan Rowland, Steven Stothard, and Camille Barbagallo, and to Brian Layng for the beautiful design work. Thank you to Loretta Ross, Silvia Federici, and Victoria Law for writing introductions to the book. What you have collectively brought to feminism and to liberatory political projects throughout the world is truly legendary. I am honored to collaborate with you all. A huge thank you to all the contributors who shared their story with me in interviews: Jodi Koumouitzes-Douvia, Kelly Gray, Laili Falatoonzadeh, Cynthea Denise, Yania Escobar, Molly Arthur, Jewel Buchanan-Boone, and Sophia Perez. Your collective dedication to birth and Reproductive Justice is unfailing and an inspiration for all involved in this struggle. A special thank you to Grace Saras, Joanna Morrison, Donae Snow, and Marina Cochran-Keith, whose births inspired the doula stories included in this book. You are warriors. Never forget it. Lastly, thank you to my father, Franklin Apfel, for your unwavering support, endless Skype conversations, and that dance move.
Foreword
Loretta J. Ross
I was terribly afraid to begin this piece on birth work. It took me a while to figure out why. My experience with birthing was probably the primary reason. I remember the trauma of my birthing experience when I was fifteen. I was pregnant because of incest, rape by a married cousin twelve years older than me. I had no choice about whether to have the baby because abortion was illegal and largely inaccessible in the 1960s. My mother stuck me in a home for unwed pregnant girls to hide me from the community. We jointly planned to give the baby up for adoption. The home was run by the Salvation Army, whose workers offered a bizarre combination of compassion and religious zealotry that blamed our pregnancies on our alleged immorality and our failure to sufficiently believe in Jesus. There was no space to talk about incest, child sexual abuse, or even the progress of our pregnancies in this setting. We woke up early every day to pray, clean the buildings, listen inattentively to a school tutor, and count the painfully slow minutes until we were liberated from this pseudo-prison by the labor pains of birth. For me, going into labor signaled liberation from confinement, returning to my family, and forgetting the horror of the entire pregnancy. It did not mean becoming a mother, because I had no intention of keeping the child of my rapist.
Until my son was born. The hospital nurses accidentally brought my son to me after his birth. I question whether it was an accident because the hospital policy was that children scheduled to be adopted were not to be brought to their mothers for nursing. Yet, my son was placed on my breast the next morning and all I could say was, He s got my face he s got my face in wonder as the miracle of mother bonding overwhelmed all of my previous decisions about this little person suckling on me. So I decided to keep my son, and I have coparented with my rapist for the past forty-seven years. I cannot overstate the impact of this decision on me and my son. While I dearly love my child, he has never received from me the unconditional love every child deserves because I had to love him despite the circumstances of his conception and birth. This type of unresolved trauma lingers in my DNA and affects my worldview, my relationships, and my physical being eve