Bridging Partisan Divides to Advance Birth Justice: The Birth Activist Movement

During the last decade a growing grassroots movement to reform the maternity care system in the U.S. has coalesced around issues as diverse as raising awareness about infant and maternal mortality and racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes, to working to increase access to midwives and out-of-hospital birth. No group better illustrates the unique potential, lessons, and challenges of the birth activist movement than The Big Push for Midwives Campaign, whose mission is simple: expand access to midwives and out-of-hospital maternity by ensuring that Certified Professional Midwives, who undergo specialized training to provide it, are legally authorized to practice in every state and territory.

While the struggle to achieve birth justice is an integral component of the larger reproductive justice movement, what sets birth activism apart is a fierce bipartisanship that is both its greatest strength and its greatest challenge. Women from the far right and the far left, radical feminists and Christian conservatives, pro-life and pro-choice activists are working together in each of the Big Push's state-level campaigns to reach consensus on strategies for advancing CPM legislation in ways that speak to the core values of both Democrats and Republicans. Finding common ground on midwifery issues, however, does not erase tensions around issues such as abortion. This session will analyze those tensions and consider the lessons that others working toward birth justice and sound public health policy in general can glean from The Big Push for Midwives Campaign's organizing and coalition-building model.