BIRTHING JUSTICE, a feature-length documentary film, captures the experiences and challenges of Black women, their famil | dG1faWFDcDcwV1A5T3M
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 I don't know if you've ever witnessed a birth, but I remember the first delivery
00:07 room I was ever in as a student nurse. It was a joyful, exciting, incredible
00:14 experience and that's something that should be available to every family.
00:19 Hi, how are you? Hi, I'm Ebony. I came back just for you so you can check your baby.
00:26 I'm going back on that table. So this is a boy or a girl? Oh, it's a surprise?
00:32 Oh, I love that. Oh, until next week? Okay, you guys are really patient. I wanted to know
00:38 like immediately. Oh, come on sir, you gotta do this work. When I think about not only
00:43 generational trauma, but also just the regular habit of trauma I feel like in
00:49 this world, in this society right now, I feel like everybody's coming into this
00:53 this life transition with baggage. So come, put your hand right here. So you put your hand
00:58 where my fingers are. Alright, push it in. You feel that little hard thing against your
01:05 fingers? That's the hand. One thing we see in birth is that folks don't always
01:11 disclose, but unfortunately in that state, in that, you know, vulnerability, things
01:18 are exposed. And so from our standpoint, we basically treat everybody like they've
01:25 had some kind of trauma without even asking. It's just way too common.
01:32 There you go, that's perfect. The biggest misconception is there's something that
01:39 we are doing. There is something inherently wrong with our body, our makeup,
01:45 our genes. There's something that we're eating. There's some ways that we are
01:50 behaving that somehow these bad habits have put us in a situation for poor
01:58 maternal health outcomes. And there's nothing that we are doing that is so
02:02 different than anyone else in this country. But for some reason, it's always
02:11 always easier to point to individual level behavioral factors as a source of
02:19 the issue. And we pour so much money into trying to, you know, change what people
02:26 eat, how much they exercise, what they do. And you can see that poor white women
02:32 with less than an eighth grade education have better outcomes than black women
02:37 with college degrees. It's not race, it's racism that's the issue.
02:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]