We need midwives who are unapologetically anti-racist

The recent MANA President’s Report by Sarita Bennett, President of the Midwives Alliance of North America, was incredibly troubling and painful to read. In it, Bennett recounts her experience of providing health care as a rural emergency room physician to a community of white supremacists, during which she “learned about their lives, mindsets, ideologies and plans, not so much as individuals, because that wasn’t important to them – but rather, about what it meant to live the neo-Nazi doctrine.” The post was particularly hurtful and re-traumatizing to many Indigenous, Black and racialized midwives and birth workers who continually navigate through various forms of racism and oppression at great cost to the integrity of their personal well-being, and to their time that could be used to further other work.