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Midwifery Approach to Lifestyle Medicine for Reproductive Health
Published in Gia Merlo, Kathy Berra, Lifestyle Nursing, 2023
Midwifery and lifestyle medicine are complementary disciplines that provide comprehensive, individualized, and evidence-based reproductive health care throughout the lifespan. Promotion of healthy lifestyle practices during preconception and pregnancy allow individuals to optimize their wellness to achieve positive outcomes. In the postpartum period, the pillars of lifestyle medicine, such as sleep, social support, and reducing stress, are vital for promotion of well-being in a time when many are vulnerable to mood disturbance. Lifestyle interventions such as mindfulness and exercise are approaches that have been found to decrease perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms. Throughout all of a person’s reproductive life, the focus on health equity and reproductive justice must be maintained. Intertwining the unique but complementary philosophies of midwifery and lifestyle medicine can help to alleviate barriers that stand in the way of inequitable care.
Postcolonial midwifery
Published in Hanna Laako, Georgina Sánchez-Ramírez, Midwives in Mexico, 2021
In fact, given this background, characterized by coercive population control methods, for many women in the Global South, Indigenous women and for people of color in the Global North, “reproductive rights” as a continuation of earlier reproductive health policies in population control appear dubious. As noted in Chapter 2, instead of reproductive rights, scholars of color prefer the term “reproductive justice,” which implies taking into account these previous coercive population control methods, including forced sterilizations (Luna 2009; Craven 2010). The proponents of the reproductive justice frame argue that, while reproductive rights have been won for affluent, middle-class White women, simultaneously those same rights have been diminished for women of color and women from lower-resource countries. Thus the particular cultural and ethnic contexts and differences play an important role in the interpretation of reproductive rights, often downplayed by Western feminists. According to some reproductive justice activists of color in the USA, the reproductive justice framework emerged in 1994 with the objective of bringing together notions of reproductive rights and social justice. As an intersectional theory, it highlights the lived experience of reproductive oppression in communities of color and expands the narrower focus on legal access and individual choice to a broader analysis of racial, economic, cultural and structural constraints.
COVID-19 and reproductive injustice
Published in J. Michael Ryan, COVID-19, 2020
Reproductive justice (RJ) is an intersectional theoretical and methodological framework that was first mapped out by an alliance of Black women, including the widely influential scholar and activist Loretta Ross, in 1994. Reproductive justice is guided by three core values – the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to safe and dignified parenting (Ross and Solinger 2017, 65). Birth justice advocates and scholars further extended this model by focusing specifically on the birthing process, arguing that pregnant individuals have the right to safe and dignified birth and elucidating the disproportionate violence experienced by birthing individuals of color (Oparah 2016). Birth justice highlights the ways in which provider racism drives birth trauma and includes a critique of disproportionate cesarean surgeries, irreversible sterilization, and birth trauma amongst women of color (Oparah 2016).
Restrictive points of entry into abortion care in Ireland: a qualitative study of expectations and experiences with the service
Published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2023
Dyuti Chakravarty, Joanna Mishtal, Lorraine Grimes, Karli Reeves, Bianca Stifani, Deirdre Duffy, Mark Murphy, Mary Favier, Patricia Horgan, Wendy Chavkin, Antonella Lavelanet
To better understand, analyse and appraise the different aspects of the implementation of Ireland’s new abortion services, we undertook a mixed methods study from 2020 through 2021.9,18–20 The overall study combined primary quantitative and qualitative data, as well as secondary data from existing literature, to examine the barriers and facilitators to the implementation of abortion policy in Ireland. This article draws on qualitative interviews with service users, GPs and key informants to examine users’ experiences accessing early medical abortions on request up to 12 weeks’ gestation. This article applies the concept of “reproductive justice” as an overarching framework,21 to examine the barriers resulting from gaps in the policy design. A reproductive justice framework considers the ability to “decide one’s own reproductive health” without the negative effects of social, political and economic inequalities as a fundamental right.22 This approach highlights the impact of such barriers on people located along multiple axes of social inequality. It also considers factors that helped facilitate access to the service.
Food Insecurity: A Barrier to Reproductive Justice Globally
Published in International Journal of Sexual Health, 2023
Jasmine Fledderjohann, Sophie Patterson, Maureen Owino
Reproductive Justice focuses on three core rights: The right to have a child; the right to not have a child; and the right to parent children with dignity in safe and healthy environments (Ross, 2017; Ross & Solinger, 2017). Importantly, each of these rights clearly connects back to sexual health as part of overall health. These rights also highlight that, though clearly essential, equitable access to high-quality healthcare is but one aspect of reproductive justice. One cannot choose if, when, and how often to reproduce (defining reproductive health choices according to WHO, 2013) without access to both reproductive healthcare, e.g. contraception and abortion care, and the means to meet the basic needs of oneself and one’s (potential) family safely and with dignity. Inequities embedded in the broad social, political, economic, and physical settings in which we live are not distinct from sexual and reproductive health, but central to it (Ross & Solinger, 2017). In this paper, we focus on food insecurity because it remains an important but under-theorized barrier to reproductive justice.
Hysterical Solidarity: An Embodied Reflection on Contemporary Sexual and Reproductive Rights Concerns in the United States
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2023
Abortion access in the United States since Roe v. Wade has remained inequitable, alongside a much broader set of health inequities worth mentioning. Reproductive justice, as opposed to reproductive rights, is a framework that encompasses many of the concerns of women of color: “access to resources and services, economic rights, freedom from violence, and safe and healthy communities” (Silliman et al., 2016, p. 12). My access to abortion is mediated through my residence in Illinois, a state with strong laws protecting abortion providers and their right to practice this highly contentious medical procedure. It is also mediated through my comfort occupying the role of the difficult patient—my ability, after years of oppositional engagement with medical authority, to confidently state and reiterate my needs. As a disabled queer woman of color speaking back to medicine and psychiatry, I am opposing hegemonic medical and legislative power structures. From the standpoint of a patient in chronic pain, I have a role to play in the mass uprising against this SCOTUS decision. Most of us probably do.