RECLAIMING THE BLACK BIRTHING EXPERIENCE The history of Black traditional midwifery & the importance of solidarity & co-learning between Black medical & midwifery students
Te Asia Hunter, MPH
Historical Background: Black Traditional Midwives & the Shift in Maternal & Perinatal Healthcare from the Community to the Market Before Western biomedicine was established as the standard of care in the U.S., holistic medicine was the primary form of care. Indigenous peoples from around the world have long practiced holistic forms of medicine and care. They integrated various aspects of health into disease prevention with the understanding that the social aspects in which we live impact our physical, emotional, and behavioral health (Shroff, 2011). One example of these holistic medicine practitioners were Black traditional, or granny, midwives in the South who brought their ancestral tradition with them when they were stolen from their African homelands to America for the exploitation of their labor and livelihoods. They practiced midwifery on the plantation and passed their knowledge and skillset down to their descendants (Oregon Health and Science University, 2022). However, during the Reconstruction Era, industry capitalists identified medicine as among the professions with the greatest influence on society and began funding reforms to medical education, training, and practice to professionalize medicine and restructure the field to serve the interests of racial capitalism (Berliner, 1975; Brown, 1980). To do so, the medical establishment launched a national anti-Black campaign against granny midwives, encouraging white women to seek out hospital-based physicians to deliver their babies. They characterized these midwives as “unintelligent”, “unskilled”, and “unsanitary” and blamed them for poor maternal health outcomes that were really a consequence of poverty, Jim Crow terror, and a lack of knowledge about hygiene, as a sanitation science movement was only just beginning to gain traction during this period (Goode and Katz-Rothman, 2017; Menzel, 2021). The medical establishment deemed childbirth as a dangerous, unnatural process that required medical intervention (e.g., anesthesia and forceps) in which only physicians were skilled enough to perform (Goode and Katz-Rothman, 2017; Barker, 1998; Menzel, 2021). They outright criminalized their traditional practices altogether in the South and placed them under the supervision and surveillance of white physicians and nurses in the North (Menzel, 2021). These efforts were ultimately successful in decimating the structures of care and bodies of knowledge that Black women has built since before the time of slavery. Such a loss of this vital ancestral tradition of community care and its associated knowledge base has contributed to today’s ongoing Black maternal mortality crisis.