Birthing Paradox: Whiteness, Trauma, and Midwifery's Terra Nullius

Abstract: Despite its countercultural origins as a movement to "reclaim birth" from alienating and violent obstetrical practices, and its importance as Black and Indigenous radical care work, contemporary home birth midwifery tends to be a "boutique" option for white consumers, while midwives of color face systemic barriers and training has often relied on a colonizing relation to non-US citizen women of color. I argue that this paradox derives from the white home birth movement's originary investments in white settler reproductive futurity: the unspoken imperative to preserve US whites' entitlements to property, family, health, and wealth from generation to generation. In this article, I examine two key phenomena of 1970s and 1980s: training clinics on the US/Mexico border and home birth manuals. These reveal that white midwives' responses to obstetrical trauma, in addition to shaping radical care practices, also underpinned a historical amnesia about the reproductive violence at the heart of colonization and racial domination. Moreover, the trauma seems to have authorized these midwives to partake in colonial dispossession themselves, asserting entitlement to Indigenous birth practices as a sort of primal commons in the name of recovering natural birth for all.