Reparative Birth Work: Black Midwifery and the Disruption of Black Inheritance

Sammendrag

From The Moynihan Report to The Washington Post’s “Coming White Underclass,” Black maternity has been consistently represented as counter to American progress. This logic is (re)produced via the myth of the “bio-underclass,” which places Black motherhood at the center of the supposed process by which intellectual deficiency leads to bad decisions leads to health problems leads to intellectual deficiency and so on. Christina Sharpe characterizes this process as well, arguing that “the womb” has been turned into “a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold and the prison.” While tackling contemporary concerns, this paper is written from a historical viewpoint, positing obstetrical harm as a particular point of this oppression and recognizing the Black women who were not only exploited and experimented on but whose knowledge of childbirth and healthcare was stolen and undermined in the name of a White masculinist medicalization.

Through my work interviewing birth workers in Los Angeles, I posit contemporary Black midwifery as a reparative blueprint. By working in a mode of preventative care, as opposed to care that takes place after trauma has occurred and poor health has taken its toll, Black midwifery takes an expansive view of health, locating harm both inside and outside the hospital. Via an epigenetic schema, this strategy resists American healthcare’s over emphasis on clear-cut “genetics” and an enduring racial science when approaching Black bodies, as we are neither cared for nor treated with the complicated inheritance of slavery in mind.