Birthing and Justice with Dr Ruth De Souza

24/02/2023

Always keen to improve my own well-being. Give it a go!

Whenever you’re feeling anxious, try this quick and easy exercise for an instant relaxation hit!

Start by holding one hand in front of you with your fingers spread. Slowly trace outside your hand with the index finger on your other hand, breathing in when you trace up a finger, and out when you trace down.

25/01/2023

Please listen and share this week's podcast with folks that might be interested. We had a fabulous conversation, and could have gone on. The poddie ends with a beautful poetry reading. Ngā mihi!

Birthing holds a different significance for Indigenous communities that have experienced colonial attempts at elimination. For scholar, poet and irredentist Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), birth is an act of resistance. She joins us to talk about her journey to parenthood and her experiences as a scholar who traverses between Indigeneity and migrancy.

Synopsis:Birthing holds a different significance for Indigenous communities that have experienced colonial attempts at elimination. For scholar, poet and irredentist Alice Te Punga Somerville, (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), birth is an act of resistance....

18/01/2023

If you missed last week's drop, check it out.

What does it mean to be part of a community without access to your birthing stories? Dr Jacynta Krakouer, a Mineng Noongar social worker and Dr Indigo Willing, a sociologist and adoptee from Vietnam contribute a powerful discussion about the history and politics of out-of-home care and inter-country adoption addressing justice, kinship, and belonging. Jacynta and Indigo bring their lived experience and their community advocacy into dialogue with a critical analysis of the institutions and mindsets that underpin how children are born in the lands now known as Australia.

Synopsis:What does it mean to be part of a community without access to your birthing stories? Dr Jacynta Krakouer, a Mineng Noongar social worker and Dr Indigo Willing, a sociologist and adoptee from Vietnam contribute a powerful discussion about ...

18/01/2023

New podcast episode! I’d be grateful if you could share it.
For Professor Catherine Chamberlain, babies are a gift from the ancestors and birth is a critical life event. But what if this time is coupled with intergenerational and complex trauma? Cath is a Palawa Trawlwoolway woman, registered midwife, and public health researcher who works to support the emotional and spiritual well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing trauma. In this critical conversation, Cath talks about her passion for healing the past by nurturing the future, improving health equity, and building perinatal awareness through storytelling and deep listening.

Synopsis:For Professor Cath Chamberlain, babies are a gift from the ancestors and birth is a critical life event. But what if this time is coupled with intergenerational and complex trauma? Cath is a Palawa Trawlwoolway woman, registered midwife,...

24/11/2022

Coming up on Season 4. Dr Indigo Willing (she/her) is a sociologist, research consultant and community volunteer. She currently lives in Meanjin on the land of the Jagera and Turrbal Peoples. Her theoretical and empirical work examines issues of power, social change and representation. Her research and community work creates bridges between academia and community sectors, and spans a number of social worlds that reflect her own diverse background and lived experiences as a Vietnam War orphan and adoptee, an Asian Australian creative, academic and skateboarder involved with inclusive community building projects. This includes establishing the Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI) network, co-founding Consent is Rad and We Skate QLD, and the Asian Australian Films, Forum, and News Network.

"Birthing has a really unusual resonance with adoptees, in the sense that we don't actually have an inheritance of a birthing story of us usually. There's not much family history if we haven't been reunited, with our original families, our first families. And often the stories of how we came to the orphanage, are partly informed by, imaginations, memories, secondhand information. We are probably one of those rare populations without birthing stories to be honest. When people are reunited then they learn about their birthing story often, quite later in life. And that in itself is a quite enormous occasion. It's not taken for granted. It's like a tremendous revelation and gift. So I think birthing will always be something that is tinged with seriousness, ingrained with all kinds of histories and political positions and it also has a deep resonance just in terms of identity and trying to salvage and recreate or re reclaim our origins as people that have a culture, people that have a family, and people that have ancestors. "

06/09/2022

Save the date 5th October 2022! I'll be talking with podcast guests from Series 2 Eleanor Jackson and Helen Ngo, along with Natalie Kon-yu from Series 3 as part of the Big Anxiety Festival. Registration details coming soon!

Caring for the carer: On birthing in the pandemic. This project is an extension of Caring for the caregiver (Nurses’ art exchange project), RMIT Galleries – and of Perinatal Dreaming, a conversation with Gina Maree Bundle, Storm Henry and Marianne Wobcke in The Big Anxiety Forum.

21/07/2022

“The worsening racial disparities of maternal and infant health in the US cut across class lines; as the New York Times reported in 2018, a black woman in the US with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education. “No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, as a black woman in the United States, if you say that you don’t feel well, that something is wrong, you are not being heard,” Aftershock co-director Tonya Lewis Lee said. She pointed to the story of tennis star Serena Williams, arguably the most famous and successful black female athlete in the world, who told doctors she was having a pulmonary embolism after the birth of her daughter Olympia in 2017 and was initially ignored. As Felicia Ellis, a black woman contemplating birth options in Tulsa, Oklahoma puts it in the film: “A black woman having a baby is like a black man at a traffic stop with the police. You have to really pay attention to what’s going on every step of the way.”

Aftershock, a grimly revealing new documentary, focuses on grieving families in a system that endangers women of colour

14/06/2022

Dropping today! Carla Pascoe Leahy on connecting the past and future in the Anthropocene

Historian Carla Pascoe Leahy was surprised at how her own experiences of new motherhood were affected by the relationships and stories she was told by her own mother and grandmothers. In this episode, she talks about how learning about her past led to researching the experience of birth in Australia over the last 75 years. Carla discusses the importance of her local community, what she’s learned about being vulnerable as a researcher and how climate change is influencing mothering.

20/05/2022

So thrilled to be sharing this episode featuring Aruna Boodram on abolitionist parenting and surviving the NICU with you.

Aruna Boodram (they/she) is a q***r, gender expansive community organizer and legal worker from the Caribbean diaspora based in Toronto. She is an educator and facilitator that works in anti-oppression, abolition, decolonization, fertility, q***r and trans family planning and other trainings. She is the autonomous-single (by choice) parent of Surya Amaris, a thriving and resilient baby Sagittarius. Aruna is also the advice columnist for Shameless Magazine, council member for the Children’s Peace Theatre in Toronto and a National Family Advisor for the Canadian Premature Babies Foundation. Content warning: This episode contains conversations about medical trauma

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798765/10650769-series-3-episode-3-aruna-boodram-on-abolitionist-parenting-and-surviving-the-nicu

Synopsis: It’s tough negotiating the highly technocratic spaces of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a hospital – let alone as the q***r, autonomous-single parent of a micro-preemie. Aruna Boodram is part of the Caribbean diaspora living in...

11/05/2022

Dropped today. Season 3: Episode 2 Lucinda Canty on racism in institutions and birthing care. Content warning: Birth trauma and Negligence.

"In my study, there was one woman who actually thought she was gonna die. She had preeclampsia, they couldn't get her blood pressure down, but she says, you know, my nurses were on it. My doctor was on it.
Even when I went home, my doctor said, you know, any problem is a big problem. So if you, even, if you think it's small, I want you to call me, let me determine that. And that gave her strength. She had preeclampsia, she had a postpartum hemorrhage and then postpartum, she developed preeclampsia again, she was stable and then she had symptoms. But because of the comfort that she had with her provider, she called right away. And he was like, you have to come in, we need to see you. So we have to develop that relationship where if somebody needs help, they know that they can rely on us to help them and listen to them and care about the symptoms that they're talking about. It's just so important. "https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798765/10583162-season-3-episode-2-lucinda-canty-on-racism-in-institutions-and-birthing-care

As a US-based Black nurse-midwife, Lucinda Canty knows that nurses and midwives do not leave their prejudices at home. Implicit assumptions and biases follow them to work and wield a profound influence on perinatal care and patient outcomes. In th...

05/05/2022

The first episode of Series 3 of the Birthing and Justice podcast has dropped with Mparntwe midwife on
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798765/10561447-ep1-cherisse-buzzacott-on-opening-the-door-for-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-midwives

28/04/2022

Season 3 is dropping next week!

In season three, I’ll be talking to amazing guests about anti-racism practice in birthing, creating nurturing and empowering spaces for birthing people, and navigating oppressive systems.

We’ll hear from Carla Pascoe-Leahy, Cherisse Buzzacott, Aruna Boodram, Lucinda Canty, Natalie Kon-Yu, Janelle Da Silva, Ritodhi Chakraborty and Aline Carrara. Check out the trailer!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798765/10510933-introducing-season-3-of-birthing-and-justice

This is the trailer for season three of the Birthing and justice podcast. This podcast is for anyone who is interested in helping to transform how birthing is experienced for people who are not the ideal imagined users of health services. For many...

17/02/2022

16/02/2022

Hi Folks, I thought I'd create a page for people who might want to create a community to support birthing and justice.

Welcome all! Here's the trailer if this is your first visit https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798765/8670401-welcome-to-birthing-and-justice

Here are the first three guests of Series 1. I'll introduce them in depth in future posts.

16/02/2022