Midwifery in Color is at the forefront of revolutionizing women’s healthcare through health equity and women centered care. The lens through which we view women’s healthcare is colored by the experiences of black and brown women in order to revolutionize their care ultimately providing health equity and mitigating healthcare disparities.

Our mission includes:

• Cultivating midwifery initiatives which reaffirm midwifery as an autonomous profession.

• Resource evidence-based wrap around diversity pipelines to increase the number of midwives of color.

• Facilitate the creation social capital for student midwives through mentorship relationships

• Serve as a historian for the legacy of midwives of color, codifying their contributions to the midwifery profession.

Preservation

We acknowledge that the midwifery history taught in most midwifery programs and promulgated at conferences fails to bear witness to the fact that midwifery history is, in the United States, largely a history of midwives of color. A history of direct-entry midwifery that begins in the 1970s with the “white revival” describes only the thinnest of top layers on a great foundation of centuries of work by African-American, Native American, Latina, Asian-American, and ethnically marginalized immigrant midwives.

Perpetuity

Reestablishing midwifery within its multicultural roots as a stand-alone profession is imperative to public health and health equity. Collectively as midwives, we must recognize how racism and classism has shaped credentials in the United States. There is a clear, well-established hierarchy of credentials; the more medicalized the credential, the more power, prestige and, to engage Weber (1948) and Collins (1979), status.

Health Equity

Health Equality versus Health Equity

Health Equality refers to equal access to needed resources to maintain or improve health outcomes.

Healthy People 2020, defines health equity as the “attainment of the highest level of health for all people. Achieving health equity requires valuing everyone equally with focused and ongoing societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities, historical and contemporary injustices, and the elimination of health and health care disparities.”

Understanding the difference between health equality and health equity is important to public health to ensure that resources are directed appropriately. Inherent to this process is the promotion of diversity in teams and personnel, public health practice, research methods and other related factors. For these reasons, providing the same type and number of resources to all is not enough. In order to reduce the health disparities gap, the underlying issues and individual needs of underserved and vulnerable populations must be effectively addressed.