December 17, 2021

Snatching Wombs From Midwives -- The Resurgence of Homegrown Contraception in a Neo-Colonial World

What is Womb Consciousness and Why is it Important?

Our ancestors entrusted the Earth to provide the healing medicines they needed to cure ailments and dis-ease. The Earth provided nourishment for them and entheogens for expanding consciousness at that time. With this connectedness, they developed a consciousness around what the womb means, and to them, it represented the cyclical, dark soil mystery of the Earth where seeds are gestated to bring forth a new generation.

What is the Womb to the Ancients?

Womb consciousness tells us that the womb is a sacred portal of life that carries and imprints the wisdom of generations. Midwives were traditionally the knowledge bearers who shared the consciousness of the womb’s divine power among their community. With the help of womb keepers, cyclical bodies carry an innate wisdom that is tethered to Earth and the moon.

Flowing in harmony with the menstrual cycle can look like being in sync with the moon. The cyclical nature that our wombs share with the moon and the Earth shows how interconnected we are with the unspoken knowledge that the womb shares with celestial life. As the moon pushes and pulls the tides, the moon also pulls blood from our bodies moving us through the endlessness of cyclical living.

When Did Stealing Wombs Begin?

For the last 2600 years, as colonization expanded, womb consciousness was forced into the underground by way of persecution. Colonizers submitted nature into uniformity to make way for larger communities and city-states and many traditional wisdom keepers were silenced or killed. In this way, humankind lost millenia of womb-keeping knowledge to reductionist oligarchs.

The Medical Industrial Complex

During the mid 19th century, in America, the invention of allopathic medical associations, like the American Medical Association, or the AMA, began to press its interests onto the general public. This began the rise of the medical industrial complex as it now exists today.

Among other traditional folk medicine systems, industrialized systems of birthing quickly displaced the ancient knowledge and practices around womb health and consciousness. Midwives who were helping women manage their menstruation and birth were vilified.

Criminalizing Abortion Is A Capitalist Move

Waging War on Traditional Midwives

Since then, medical institutions continue to lobby against at home abortions and traditional womb care because they cannot profit from communities who govern their own reproductive rights. Physicians who established the AMA, a predominately white male association, lobbied against midwives as a means of eliminating their competition.

“During the second half of the 19th century, American physicians’ intent on overseeing women’s reproductive health campaigned to criminalize abortion, sending a common practice underground.” 7 Medical journals were “referring to midwives as abortionists describing them as dangerous and ignorant.”3 Even though studies established that midwives had a higher success rate than physicians in the early 20th century, “States began writing new laws restricting midwifery, and the share of births that midwives attended dropped from half in 1900 to 15% by 1930.”3

Abortion is Forced Into the Underground

Midwives and womb keepers continue to be vilified because they stand in the way of medical institutions profiting from reproductive health. Making abortion illegal will not stop a person from seeking one if they need it, and womb keepers know that. Because of the crisis, networks of abortion doulas continue to work together to provide at home abortions for low-income women who are fed up with how the medical system treats them. Here is an article about the secret network providing home abortions across the US.

Beyond the use of hormonal birth control for contraception, many people lean into these medications because they are the only means they’ve been told they can manage their symptoms. For women with milder conditions and discomforts of the womb, we recommend looking into our Period Party blend, which has shown a 80% decrease in PMS symptoms for some women.

Experimentation Without Consent

Wombs of the world have been experimented on with the intent of controlling reproduction through sterilization and synthetic hormones. The folks who thought it would be morally in line to sterilize an entire nation of women were called the eugenicists. Eugenics is a pseudoscience founded on the belief that selective breeding will lead to a “gifted” or “superior” race instead of natural selection.

The Puerto Rico Birth Control Experiment

During the 20th century, eugenicists forced sterilization policies on minorities with disabilities believing they were “feebleminded”and incapable of raising families. One of these people was the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. She worked alongside physicians to develop a synthetic form of birth control. The largest trial of the drug was tested on 1,500 Puerto Rican women without knowing its effects. If you enjoy hormonal birth control, please take a moment to understand how black and brown bodies were sacrificed in order to make it happen.

“The theories as to why Puerto Rico was chosen as a testing ground, despite its heavily Catholic population, are multiple: It was an easy flight from the U.S. mainland. There were no laws there against birth control. And the location’s overcrowding and poverty made it especially attractive to biologist Gregory Pincus, who was concerned about global population control.” 9

The medicalization of reproductive health has disembodied whole communities from their ancestral right to natural births and contraception. Instead of embracing traditions that were passed down for centuries, capitalists and scientists sought to profit from experimentation and slander with no regard for its impact on the community.

Decolonizing Womb Health

Who Does Roe v Wade Serve?

Currently, Roe v. Wade is in danger of being overturned which poses harm for BIPOC and low-income families who rely on having access to centralized womb care services. People need to know that they have options if their access to reproductive care is inhibited. What Roe v. Wade provides for the people is different than what it gives to physicians, “Roe upheld a doctor’s right to perform an abortion, not a woman’s right to choose one. Choice wasn’t just whether a woman could seek an abortion but also how and when she wanted to have it, who she wanted around her, and where she wanted to be.”3

Coming Back to Traditional and Plant Contraception

If midwives were capable of conducting at home abortions safely before doctors were ever involved, why can’t they continue to share this knowledge outside of the medical industrial complex despite the overturn?

Abortion doulas are in a position to offer services to women they may not receive from Planned Parenthood, such as preventative womb care and abortion aftercare. Many of the cold and sterile environments where abortions are given may not be as supportive nor actually tailored to the needs of someone who require more attentive care than clinics can provide.

The Difference in Care

People deserve human contact, emotional care after a traumatic procedure and support for processing the emotional baggage that comes with making a difficult decision like abortion. It is imperative that every person have sovereignty over their choice to bear children; neither church nor state should possess this power.

If you’re ready to make a leap forward in your womb health and ditch synthetic birth control, this natural birth control guide can help you get acclimated and familiar with various methods for preventing pregnancy.

How Do Feel About Your Bleeding Time?

Along with reproductive care, every community deserves a support system of sex positive adults who can offer comprehensive womb care and teach young people to come into their sexuality safely. When the whole community is connected with the natural cycles of the Earth we come into balance with it as a collective. As a part of that, an emphasis on positive menstruation consciousnesses to balance.

Get back in touch with Period Party, an herbal blend that can connect you with the wisdom of your period while also easing the pain of cramps and providing emotional balance when you need it.

We are taking back our reproductive health from medical institutions and herbs can help us through all phases of the cyclical shedding that we require. Implementing natural birth control practices, incorporating herbal remedies and tracking the menstrual cycle requires discipline before mastery.

When you work with plants you are calling back your power as a sovereign being. Remember that the Earth can also provide us with the medicine we seek.

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