Reclaiming Birth: Black Doula Training Programs as Counter-Clinical Spaces

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 7: Race and Racialization

Abstract

Since the Women’s Health Movement, women have designed counter-clinical spaces as part of a campaign to challenge medical professional authority and to claim a greater degree of control over their bodies and health. These counter-clinical spaces are quasi-clinical spaces that reshape the clinical encounter by challenging medical frameworks, attitudes, and belief systems about health and illness, examples include women’s health centers, domestic violence programs, and sexual assault crisis centers. However, maternal health in the United States primarily remains under the authority of medicine. Moreover, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, with Black women experiencing maternal death up to three times the rate of white women. As a response, Black maternal health advocates have begun to create their own counter-clinical spaces, such as Black doula training programs. In this paper, I use theories and concepts from medical sociology to analyze how Black doula training programs operate as counter-clinical spaces, reshaping the clinical encounter in order to address the Black maternal mortality crisis in the United States. By applying medical sociological concepts such as professional authority, autonomy, dominance, and jurisdiction, this review highlights how Black doula training programs seek to challenge the dominant medical framework on pregnancy and birth. This review concludes by highlighting how further research is needed to understand how Black doula training programs function as counter-clinical spaces to contest and reconfigure professional authority, autonomy, and dominance in maternal health programs.

Author

• Julisa J. Fernandez-Rivera, Northeastern University