Raw, unfiltered birth stories for healing and hope.
Birthing in America is a mix of joy and despair.
Hi there – I’m Mani.
I experienced two wonderful births and I believe every person deserves a positive, beautiful birth experience.
Jessica Valenti’s Abortion Every Day newsletter inspires me with her daily reporting on the devastating impact of restrictive abortion laws across the United States. It’s just as important to discuss the uphill battle that women face when giving birth, too.
The topic of birth is the sad sister-companion to abortion in that it is wrought with problems stemming from systemic racism, bigotry, misogyny, and the degradation of women when it comes to their health choices.
At the heart of the abortion debate and our maternal mortality problem is the utter disrespect of women, especially Black and Indigenous women. In a country so devoted to “supporting life” we certainly haven’t prioritized our maternal mortality and infant birth problems. But I hope this newsletter helps to move the needle.
Sobering facts about birth in the U.S.
In the U.S. more than 50,000 women per year experience “catastrophic complications” during birth; 864 women died of maternal causes in 2020. A USA Today investigation dubbed the United States as the "most dangerous place to give birth in the developed world."
Maternal mortality got worse in 24 countries between 2000 to 2015 including some of the poverty-stricken nations in the world, and yes– America. Globally maternal mortality rates dropped by more than one-third, but America’s maternal and infant mortality rates got worse.
Illustrating just one example of our flawed system is a recent NY Times story in which a Brooklyn-based anesthesiologist made numerous errors in administering epidurals, and whose incompetence ultimately killed laboring first-time mother Sha-Asia Semple.
This doctor’s negligence was such a non-priority that despite a history of problematic behavior, the hospital only recently took the matter seriously enough to be investigated after much public upheaval.
There’s also the C-section problem. The WHO estimates that only between 6-15% of cesareans are necessary, while 32% of births in the United States is delivered via c-sections according to CDC. The point is, women are countlessly pressured into have C-sections whether they truly need them or not leading to complications and trauma in some cases.
Poverty, lack of prenatal care and disappearing access to resources in rural areas contribute to America’s maternal mortality statistics. And of course, racism plays a part.
Black women, nationally are three times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as white women even holding for factors such as income (this jumps to 12 times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than their white counterparts in New York state). Pre-eclampsia and eclampsia (seizures that develop after pre-eclampsia) are 60 percent more common in African-American women and also more severe.
Experts point to a range of factors to explain racial disparities, including a prevalence of underlying medical conditions, a lack of access to prenatal care or good medical insurance, and racial biases: Some providers fail to take some patients’ medical complaints seriously – an experience that even the venerable Serena Williams was subject.
My story
I was lucky to experience two very beautiful and positive births as told in my podcast here which I attribute to my loving birth attendants (my sister and now-husband), and to my doula who I was barely able to afford.
Despite having birth advocates, I felt like I was fighting my doctor’s dismissive condescension and straight up disrespect throughout my pregnancy, and of course in the delivery room. (When I requested that we delay cord clamping, he flopping into a stool like a petulant child, sighing “Well I guess we’ll be here all night.”)
For my second birth; I delivered birth at home, an incredible privilege.
And what of the rest of us? Not everyone has the access and options to make the same choices I did; yet every birthing family deserves to feel supported and safe in their birth.
I wrack my brain often about reproductive justice, especially birth.
What solutions are there? How can birthing families gain access to labor/birth information, resources, advocacy and justice?
Where do we go from here?
I think the solution is multi-faceted and layered– from improving policy and systems, to providing access to resources and education.
Our medical community should proactively hire competent anti-racist medical professionals who are trained in inherent bias, and implement more protocols specifically shaped to protect our BIPOC families. And Black doctors should lead the charge in this work. On a policy level we should fund research, reporting and investigations into why our system is broken.
Medical schools should do more to recruit and financially support BIPOC medical students. We should publicly fund more Black doulas to gain certifications to practice.
We should fund and support programs that provide birth resources and education and community, and provide doula and midwifery care to women of all socioeconomic statuses. And yes, perhaps less people should be delivering their babies in hospitals, period.
At the core of all of these ideas is the biggest lift of them all which is shifting our cultural beliefs around what and who is important in our society (a more difficult feat). Which is where storytelling comes in.
