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.
Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK