Humanizing Birth

There is an urgent need to critically rethink birth care worldwide. Critical Midwifery Studies Collective confronts systemic injustice in sexual, reproductive, maternal, and newborn care.

“We are activist, loving, inclusive, fluid, radical, knowledgeable, wise, communal, feminist, connected, caring.”

Team

Creative concept and web design: Marjolein Pijnappels
Digital collages: Marjolein Pijnappels
Digital drawings: Noëmi Willemen of Le Coeur Maree Basse.
Content and Organization: Rodante van der Waal

A collective mission

In the summer of 2022 I attended an online summerschool of Utrecht University about ‘Humanizing Birth’. Since I gave birth myself, birth and perinatal care have become a special interest, that I am channeling into projects such as Speculative Birth Futures, my TEDx pitch and my AI experiments re-imagining birth spaces. The summer school was the kick-off of an international movement and critical studies of Midwifery Studies and introduced me to a pluriverse of alternative, natural, technological and communal birth care practices.

The collective confronts systemic injustice in sexual, reproductive, maternal, and newborn care. They are a true collective of birth workers, midwives, doula’s, researchers, artists and activists who have come together to work on this transgenerational effort. They build on the work that has come before within a culture of critique, yet, without tearing down those who have paved the way. They invite multiple perspectives and voices to contribute to this collaborative endeavor.

Visualizing radical birth care

To inspire, activate and grow the collective and its mission, we needed a provocative look and feel. We prepared and organized an online session with digital brainstorm tool Mural, where members of the collective established guide posts with respect to target groups and stakeholders, ‘need to haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ for the website and analyzed inspirational examples from the fields of web design, activist campaigns, and social media. We also co-created a vision board that translated the collective’s mission in visual imagery.

Keywords that guided our work where: activist, loving, inclusive, fluid, radical, knowledgeable, wise, communal, feminist, connected, caring.

Communal knowledge sharing

wondermash has helped transform the online summerschool of ‘22 into an inspirational, online learning platform of communal knowledge, freely providing those working within or with reproductive, sexual, maternal, and newborn care with the resources to educate themselves on humanizing birth.

In five parts learners take a deep dive to recalibrate and improve their practices learning from anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, indigenous, queer, postcolonial and futurist perspectives on birth care.