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…
