White Privilege in the Birth Space

This is a picture of me,

standing in my own white privilege.

This is a woman whose ancestors were never stolen. Whose babies were never taken. Her mind won’t even for a moment touch the trauma and stress of such possibilities.

Instead, she’s held safe.

This is a woman who has had the luxury of reading hundreds of books to prepare for this moment. Books written by women with the same colour skin and similar life experiences to guide her through.

This is a woman who carries no generational trauma from racism into the birth room.

This is a woman bathed in the safety of being lower risk - literally less likely to die in childbirth - because she is a white woman. A woman who has barely contemplated perinatal death or neonatal death because the stats are on her side.

A woman who won’t for a moment concern herself with the high prevalence of low birth weight babies for Indigenous mothers, because as a non-Indigenous mother herself, it’s not relevant to her story.

This is a woman born into the privileged position of being able to complete years of full-time study and countless training courses to understand medical terminology, physiology, pathology and true medical need to draw from as needed in these moments.

This is a woman that feels comfortable in challenging the status quo and standing in her autonomy. Who, when care providers suggest non-evidence based intervention, feels comfortable in calling that out - because she owns a sense of entitlement that comes with not having to consider any unconscious racial bias in her care providers.

This is a woman in birth surrounded by other women of her race and her native language. A woman who won’t for a single moment of either of her birthing experiences be the racial minority in the room.

This is a woman who was able to birth on the country she wanted to birth on with the people she wanted to birth with because those resources existed.

This is a woman who’ll look deeply at her fresh divine new babe and won’t for a single moment own the grief of limitations pressed upon heaven sent babes by a racism so ingrained that it’s in the very fabric of our being. Our breathing. She’ll never ache to hold a babe whose life expectancy is shortened before their very first breath.

This is a woman whose extended breastfeeding success will be partly attributed to the colour of her skin and what that brings to her. And she won’t even realise that - or any of it - for years.

This is a woman who has never been more vulnerable and never more cocooned by her skin colour than she is in this moment.

And I ache for a more universally compassionate and even story for all women birthing babies on this sacred ground. For all to be seen, heard and held safe.

I love these pictures. But this week I am seeing them in an entirely different light.

This week I don’t just see my power, I see my privilege. I see my white privilege. And I become a truer, more meaningful ally.

Amy O’Brien

Written on Boon Wurrung Land.