Birth Privilege as White Privilege

In The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (2017), I argued the need to ‘disentangle the plot’ of pregnancy as it has a naturalised and uncritical access to heteronormative gender privilege. In this paper, with the premise that, ‘whiteness is property,’ as argued by Cheryl Harris in 1993, I extend this work to how birthing is only a story for the white entitled few, and as an entitlement, is tied to the making and preserving of the ‘nuclear family’ and ‘family values.’ As this history of birth privilege as white privilege is also a trauma history, I include an analysis of two documentaries on the preventable deaths for women of colour (and black women in particular), Aftershock (2022) and Nekeshia Wall’s Reclaiming Power: The Black Maternal Crisis (2021). Here, I am compelled to ask: How best to reclaim the pervasive loss of narrative control over when and how to ‘give birth’ and to interrupt dominant narratives over the phenomenon of giving birth? Much of my critique was informed by conversations with my named contributor, Valencia Andrews, a New York–based doula, who provided insight into the birthing experiences of BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of colour) women.