Why Restoring Birth as Ceremony Can Promote Health Equity

Abstract

Until the mid-20th century, birth in the United States for Latinx Indigenous peoples was an ancestral ceremony guided by midwives and traditional healers (parteras curanderas). As American physicians and nurses increasingly differentiated themselves from traditional midwives, midwives of color in particular were disparaged and excluded from helping women give birth and thus from making birth a cultural foothold in their lives. As a result, communities of Latinx Indigenous peoples were culturally and spiritually separated—via the marginalization of parteras—from important health traditions, which caused suffering and illness. Reimplementation of birth as ceremony means babies can be born (and communities reborn) into an ancestral cultural ecology characterized by safety and cultural reclamation of healing.