Black Student Midwives Speak Series

DoulaChronicles was created so that a platform to share education related to birth with the main audience being Black and Brown folks existed. I created what I needed to see when I entered this birth worker journey. Disclaimer, i'm not a writer so bare with me. But I’ve been wanting to voice some issues I’ve been witnessing since transitioning from a Doula to a Student Midwife. Every week (sometimes daily) I am reading a new article online about how unsafe it is for black women to birth in this country. I am tired, so tired of people writing about us dying in childbirth without to a solution. Places with healthier outcomes utilize Midwives so why aren’t we? Why are there less than 2% of black Midwives when prior to birthing in Hospitals enslaved Africans delivered both white and Black babies? Why can’t our community access us anymore? In my eyes, these statistics are intentional.

I interviewed several Black student Midwives about the complexities and barriers that are in place today that keep us from serving our communities like national midwifery organizations and schools that further perpetuate the white supremacy and anti-black policies that eradicated our Granny Midwives. We’re in schools without Black and Brown Midwives preceptors. Our curriculums don’t include practices and traditions on how we can serve our community. Our counterpart/white “sister” students refuse to do the work in allyship and solidarity. And collectives that control how we learn, where we learn and how we get licensure are constantly making it more difficult for women of color to become Midwives without consulting us. We’re dying in massive numbers that should be noted as a national crisis. Again, in my eyes this is all intentional.

Please check out interviews from Black student midwives following this post. Search "Black Student Midwife"