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Midwives, Doulas and the Push For Better Care
Facing racism at hospitals, some women of color turn to home birth
In her 10 years as a practicing midwife, Racha Lawler experiences mostly joy, but she’s also learned one disturbing truth: Many women of color have been traumatized during a hospital birth. She recalls one woman in particular, who labored for 52 hours. Nurses insisted she and her baby could both die if a surgeon didn’t perform a crash C-section. She stood her ground, insisting that the heart rate of her other children had also dipped slightly during delivery. An hour and a half after staff tried to bully her into the surgery, she gave birth to a healthy baby.
“[The nurses] were simply tired of being there. Everyone was over it, except the woman and her partner,” Lawler remembers. “She was irate later.”
Days after giving birth, the woman suddenly began to get the shakes while standing in the shower. She collapsed on the bathroom floor and began sobbing from the realization that she had been horribly mistreated by hospital staff. She vowed to seek a home birth if she ever became pregnant again, sure that a midwife would never tell her something “so terrifying” in the midst of labor.
Increasingly, disturbing experiences like this one are driving women of color to pursue alternative birthing options. Home birth is still considered either a fringe practice, or another “wellness” trend pushed by White women. Some women of color, on the other hand, see it as a necessary measure to protect themselves and their children.
Racial biases are so deeply ingrained in hospitals that Black women, in particular, are three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than White women. Even if she has an advanced degree, a Black woman is more likely to lose her child than a White woman with less than a high-school education. Discrimination at hospitals ranges from the near-violent experience of Lawler’s friend, to microaggressions that are none-the-less haunting for new parents: Lawler’s clients tell her that a legal partner was listed as “baby daddy” in their official medical records, or that they’d been drug tested without consent during a routine appointment.
