Reflect the magic.
Midwives, called up by moontides,
rush down the street at midnight
to lay hands on your back
and be there past dawn.
Understand, too, the wickedness.
The betrayal that snuck in around
the door,
violent handed lovers, resource
scarcity,
the things they did to witches.
A lot of this has always been here.
There's a political side though //
things did get a lot worse when
medicine got involved.
There's a narrative of birthing since the 1900's
that looks like men taking the
power out of women's hands
and doing things to their bodies
that they believe to be necessary.
I found a book two poets wrote about birth.
In this book, they keep asking,
is this a feminist issue?
They know that it is.
They know that when it concerns
women's bodies,
it becomes about power and control.
I'm reading this book at a conference about ending intimate violence.
Everyone came here to talk about
access and healing.
They don't ask, is this a feminist
issue?
There are just the other questions,
what else is it also?
Our bodies exist in a multiplicity.
Some of us are in more vulnerable
places than others.
Is this about power and control?
Violence is structural.
At this conference they asked people to rise
if they had been doing this work
for five years, ten years, twenty.
No one stood up after thirty five.
That's the same time people started
talking a lot more about birthing at home.
Midwifery doesn't call itself
feminist a lot though.
But when you look at what it means
to have people struggling for each
other and themselves, in their homes,
trying to find a different way out.
Especially when it's about bodies.
Especially when it's about women's
bodies.
It's pretty hard not to see that as
a feminist act.
Midwifery is sometimes called the oldest profession.
I wonder how old do we name this
work,
those who work to end violence.
We say, people have always given
birth,
where do we place the always here?
I feel like I can see the history we carry
in these movements built by
mothers.
We talk together
about mitigating the trauma.
Mitigate means to make less
painful, less severe.
Like we can.
Like I hope we can.
Mitigate means the least we can do.
It means learning how to carry a
story in your bones
in a way that does not make you
sick.
There are stories we need to learn to carry in our bones
in ways that do not make us sick.
This a feminist act.
Survival is
a feminist act.
Reclamation and transformation,
your sexuality and their violence,
your body and their legislation,
your birth and their tools.
We will create a better world
in spite of them.
