WHAT:
The Birth Justice Podcast NYC takes a close, comprehensive and creative look at how folks in New York City experience and navigate reproductive oppression and create resilience strategies for their health and their families. Through storytelling and conversations, BJP NYC provides a space for dialogue and debate addressing one of New York City’s most pressing public health and racial justice issues: birth. Hosted by Taja Lindley, podcast episodes feature one-on-one long form interviews and conversations with advocates, organizers, historians, scholars, healers, birth workers, pregnant and parenting people, and folks of reproductive age.
The first episode dropped Wednesday July 8th and featureds an interview between the host, Taja Lindley, and her mother, Adrianne Robinson, where they discussed Robinson’s experience giving birth to Lindley in 1985. This was a special occasion because the release date is also Lindley’s birthday.
WHY:
In the United States, Black women are three to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy related causes than white women. But in New York City, Black women are eight times more likely to die than white women. This is twice the national average. And during this pandemic moment, matters of public health are brought into focus, including long standing health inequities like maternal health. For example,when COVID first hit, NYC hospitals barred visitors during childbirth, leaving many people to labor alone. In response, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order allowing laboring people to have one support person during their childbirth. A few weeks after it was issued, however, Amber Rose Isaac - a 26-year-old pregnant Black woman - died after giving birth in a Bronx hospital.
This work is a portrait of a mother.
The living room was built to contain her feelings, with the walls programmed to reveal them based on the proximity of the audience. The wallpaper, patterned from another portrait of the mother five months pregnant with her second set of twins, offers an abstracted glimpse of her. The books and the photographs are hers. This work explores her lived experience and her interior life.
Beneath the mothering and the obligation and the sacrifice, is she there? Is this her? What is she feeling?
Reproduction(s) is a comprehensive taxonomy of contraceptive methods that uses replication and pattern to create wallpaper panels. Turning contraceptives into wallpaper allows for everyday exposure to each method. With repeated exposure comes familiarity and eventually comfort. With comfort comes use and dialogue—dialogue between partners, between parents and children, between schools and students.
Parturition is a photographic archive and written history of obstetric and gynecological tools: their appearance, development, and how they have or have not changed.
Obstetrical and gynecological history is full of contradictions and complications. Medical history has been fraught with racism and sexism—tools were often forcibly tested on the poor, the enslaved, and sex workers. Conversely, without these improved tools, many women would have had to deliver unwanted pregnancies or died in childbirth. On the one hand, male doctors interceded into the female realm of midwifery and delivery; on the other hand, doctors saved the lives of women and infants in delivery.
When I set out to photograph these items in various medical libraries, I expected to find gruesome tools; instead, I often found early forms of implements still in use today such as forceps and speculums. Some were created pre-germ theory and used materials such as leather, wood, horn or ivory. Others more closely resemble and use materials familiar to us today.
By photographing the tools digitally and printing them to replicate twentieth century glass educational slides, I intend to connect historical uses and developments with contemporary tools and practices. This allows us to examine how women's reproductive health and medicine evolved, yet still remains the same.