Fund Mothering to Defund the Police
A picture paints a thousand words, but unfortunately, after generations of systematic maternity/birth abuse, people don’t see it as abuse. They don’t see the profound statement of this photo, or ask the question: How did precious babies become riot cops? I want to talk about the need to fund mothering to defund the police. Do you see that in the photo? No? So, I need to write a thousand words.
Why don’t people see it? What happened? Obstetric medicine happened. The misogynist, manmade, male-defined, and man-led model of drugged birth and routine, ritualized separation of mother and baby happened. In the late 1850s, the newly formed American Medical Association led a successful effort to criminalize midwifery and abortion. This is when the male practice of managing birth — for control and for profit began
Most people alive today experienced a medicalized birth as a baby being born and as the mother giving birth. Because birth is so primal, so emotional, and so vulnerable, it is easy to manipulate, so people defend their experience as good. Generations of watching this on television and in movies has taught humanity to accept this medical version of not only normal, but convinced people that it is better and safer than what nature planned.
The smart, kind people who spend their lives training to serve people — doctors and nurses — in that system are unconsciously complicit. Their training has taught them that they are God. While their souls ache, they are convinced of their superior knowledge and position over the person giving birth. Neither they see nor do new mothers/fathers-to-be remember that the human newborn baby (infant, toddler, and child) is precious and deserving of kindness and respect while birthing. Everyone has forgotten they were the baby who deserved that, and that theirs and every baby is the most precious resource we have.
Precious human newborn babies and infants are sentient, aware, and feeling beings. They will become the next generation of adults, and their development will be according to how they experienced the massively important experience of leaving womb, separating physically from the mother, and needing to reconnect to her outside the womb, at her breast looking into her eyes. Most humans alive today experience repeated, sustained, and intense disconnections from the mother throughout that relatively short but very potent time — labor, birth, and first hours and days. The newborn baby has no option but to wire up their brain according to what is happening at this time. There is no acknowledgment of how the mother-baby relationship is deeply impacted — for life.
The dysfunction we live now begins with the routine and ritualized, abusive, assembly-line model of birth that separates the mother-baby from beginning to end. The painful, separating, shaming experiences of obstetric birth are normalized now with the routine use of non-natural, non-science-based practices based on the pathologizing of women’s bodies, all for-profit — while denying nature and true physiologic midwifery. This very distorted way of giving birth and being born is the root cause of everything we seek to change. It is. We see the consequence of routinely abusing generations of precious babies in this profound photo.
Every precious newborn baby is born with the highest potential to be a happy, harmonious, healthy human being capable of compassion, cooperation, and communication. Protecting and supporting that — mothering and protecting mother-baby connection during labor, birth, and postpartum — is how we create the neural wiring to BE that person. To be capable to participate to create the world we all say we want, we have to stop doing the opposite from day one, through childhood. Stop separating mother-baby. This deeply ingrained acceptance of the deliberate and profound actions of routine, ritualized separation of mother and baby is designed to maintain a dysfunctional, disordered, and diseased humanity. Frederick Douglass spoke of this.
“The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”
— Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, Chapter 1, p. 50
White men in the US in the 1800s who thought they had the right to enslave black people knew that the separation of the mother-baby destroyed the family. Destroying the family gave them — the system — control for life. The system that we live, love, and hate.
If you want to #defundpolice you must first #fundmidwifery and #fundmothering.
Let me share with you my thoughts of over forty-five years after giving birth — violently — to a baby at age seventeen and then going back to work and school in 2 weeks. I started college in January 1979, at age 22 with a 3.5-year-old and a 1-year-old, and newly divorced. As a young woman coming of age in the 70s, I realized too late that, “Sure, I can have it all, but just not at the same time.” I rode those two horses (mothering and career) long and hard with one ass as every mother does. To exhaustion. My children suffered and I struggled because my society did not see my babies as precious or my care of them as valuable work worthy of being paid. Never has. I realized along the way that my “mother’s guilt” was not mine.
I realized that the degree of guilt and shame a mother has is the degree of violation she has experiences in abuse or lack of support. It is the guilt and shame of my culture that forced me to constantly choose between the choices served up by the society — children or job (equality, financial resources). Now I am a pre and perinatal psychologist and birth trauma therapist on a mission. This is my first Medium post.
I coined the hashtag #Fundmothering and here is what it is:
- Pay every baby’s mother to STAY home with him or her for 2 years. It should be about the baby. Baby Stay, not Family Leave. Babies need the body who made him or her, and their family (people who love them), in order to develop a healthy emotional brain.
Have you considered how words define our thinking? We are programmed to see how the job is more important than our babies, more important than our needs as new mothers. We are taught to fight for the right to leave our JOBS to care for our precious babies. With no way to provide a living to do it. So bizarre.
In our programmed thinking (by enslavers of black people) and in our resulting language, we are not fighting for the right to care for the newborn human baby — which is what every woman’s body and soul screams for — during the critical time that babies need the mother for healthy emotional brain development. How crazy is that?
And, right now, you are going into defense mode, aren’t you? You are programmed to defend what was done to you, what was taken from you (as your fault, with your dysfunctional female body), and to see it as a choice you made. The system defined the choices you have. Not women. Not you. You get to choose from choices not ever defined by what women wanted and needed.
Please keep reading. I am far from a mommy shamer. So far. If I am shaming I am shaming the collective culture that creates the war. I am always developing an evolving understanding and plan to pursue ending the mommy war. Shaming me (wrongly) for being a shamer for my ultimate defense of women’s rights to true choice and economic sovereignty is ironic. It is what the systems want you to do.
2. Protect women’s scholarships, educational status, jobs, practices (art, therapy, coaching, music, etc), career progress, and businesses for 2 years. Choosing to be a mother means great sacrifice in ways no one can imagine until they are experiencing it.
Choosing motherhood — especially when not planned — should not create such a horrible conflict and losses for women. It means women will always lag behind men and people who are not mothers.
Two years is what the mother-baby attachment science has always told us is critical for human development, starting really with Harry Harlow’s monkey studies about separating mothers and babies. He is seen as abusing the monkeys now, but the irony is that babies in the cultures are treated the same. Every day in every hospital in every city and in how we expect babies to be ok, and thrive, in the same circumstance so women can go to “real jobs”. But because our mothers and grandmothers were forced to do mothering, housework, and manchild care with no financial compensation and rights, we never saw the value of mothering as worthy of being paid.
So, in the seventies, we denied mothering and baby development in order to go to work and achieve economic equality. Second-wave feminism. My generation. In 1979 the National Institutes of Health, Maternal Child Health division squelched the previously revered research showing that babies need mothers for two years. Instead of seeing caring for the next generation of humans as worthy work, worthy of pay and regard, the director, a Ph.D. in nutrition (think about that in terms of what we know now about breastfeeding) fired the researcher. Dr. James Prescott, a neurobiologist in charge of multiple research projects was fired and his work basically erased. It did not jell with the new agenda.
Then and now, women do not want to leave their babies AND they want equality, AND they do want to be something other than mothering. Women deserve to have it all — but not be expected to do both at the most critical time of their baby’s development. Create a brain wired for safety, compassion, and love while doing a whole other full-time job.
Women can have it all, just not at the same time. Our men, our government, our culture, people who do not or will never have children, all need to see the value of the women who do create the next generation of humans. They need to support women to have it all, or at least not lose the opportunity because they choose motherhood. Fundmothering could nearly eliminate the pro-life vs pro-choice manmade (and established in 1979) debate.
3. When mothers can’t and don’t want to stay home for two years, allow the mother/father/family to decide and choose who they decide to pay to care for their baby/children. Grandparents and families are already providing part or all of the patchwork of child care which means families are making great time and financial sacrifices.
Elizabeth Warren had her Aunt Bea who came to stay to help and stayed sixteen years. The new Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett’s oldest child of seven is 19 and her husband’s aunt came to stay and is still there.
That’s great for the children, the family, and the woman. That’s still a sacrifice by another woman who is also unpaid. Do they get a living wage, time off, medical care insurance, retirement? Maybe the family will take care of them as elders. But even familial caregivers of children — usually women — need financial independence. Devaluing caregivers of children is a devaluing of children. Phyllis Schlafly was able to be one of the most liberated women of the 70s (ironically as she spent her life opposing it) because her sister-in-law cared in-home for Phyllis’s six children. It is reported that Phylis snubbed her sister-in-law in her acknowledgment of her husband and then mostly grown children when receiving an achievement award.
A mother can never achieve without the support of many other people. Every baby deserves this opportunity that these three powerful women have accomplished — because of family and two with the financial support of a wealthy husband. But, see how ingrained even and especially the people in charge and our female role models are? Sadly, Elizabeth Warren’s next best option does not translate to funding that. She wanted to fund more institutional care. The focus is not on what BABIES and their mothers and fathers truly need, but that corporate America needs women back at work.
And, in fact, this patchwork of family, friends, and institutionalized (state-funded and overseen) is how most women manage to have provided care for their babies — to go to their minimum wage to professional jobs. But their caregivers are typically unpaid or low-paid and do it for the love of the mother and child. They are needed because women know — in their bones and cells — that institutionalized care is not healthy and it is not affordable, and that family truly cares for their babies.
Why is child care considered not worthy of being paid if it is the mother or the family member? Why is it ok to be paid for caring for a child so long as the child is not the woman’s baby? Or not related. Douglass’s statement about destruction of the family is evident throughout our culture. The Child Protective System will pay large amounts of money to strangers to foster children and pay for a myriad of therapeutic services, but it is considered unthinkable to invest that in the mother/family. Financially supporting mothers is abhorrent but leaving newborn babies to go to a job is expected.
Family leave is doled out with all kinds of requirements, prerequisites, and restrictions. Why is leave called Family Leave? LEAVE? Who is leaving and what are we leaving? Family LEAVE is about the corporation, leaving the job, not about the family, not about the baby. It is not about what the precious human baby in an extremely critical period of development needs.
We need to change our perspective to see WHO Family/Maternity Leave is really about. It is not about leaving or staying with the BABY, but is only about leaving the JOB. Take a pause and think about that. Leave is about leaving the job, not the baby nor the mother, nor the father or family needs. It is about protecting the needs of the corporation or business first, family second, and babies last. It is about leaving the care of a precious human baby to strangers to go to the job. THIS is the dilemma of every new mother and it is profoundly devastating and damaging. The wounding generations of women is, I believe, the root of the “mommy wars.” This thinking that protects the workplace first is the root of all that worries us as humans contemplating the future in our desire for peace, not war.
A gestating and newly born baby or infant doesn’t know or care about the mother’s job, or income, religion, race, preferred pronouns, education, or geography. The baby only wants what s/he BIOLOGICALLY NEEDS. The baby only needs and wants proximity to the body who made him or her. That body is still gestating the early emotional brain. The first year of life is when the emotional centers of the brain are in critical development. Mother-baby separation is a very serious issue. If we focus on the emotional health of mother-baby during the exact time of early emotional brain development we can eliminate much of the “mental health” issues of our culture.
Every precious baby needs the mother: a well-resourced, protected, supported mother during the baby's fourth trimester when the emotional, limbic brain is in critical development. The limbic system is in critical development in the last trimester through second year of life. The baby needs the heart and body that made them during the first year minimum, within a family and community for two years. Our collective responsibility is to ensure that. We need to think about and shift our perspectives and priorities. We need to call this thing, Baby Stay. When we make that shift in our collective consciousness, to focus on “mother staying with the baby”, we will create a humanity that is not what the photo with this article shows.
If we shift our consciousness to focus on the emotional brain development of the next generation, we can shift our focus from war to compassion. Our GNP, and our environment, and our economy can be better served actually and still robust — probably more so — when based on the human needs of the new precious baby. Health, wellness, and happiness — being a functional human — can be very profitable too. All we have to do is think it.
This is the information that we have been denied and it has changed our thinking and that is very harmful to future humanity. The late T. Berry Brazelton, MD, a Harvard pediatrician was known for his work with infants. I watched him on a little PBS station cable show in 1983 while I pregnant with my third child. I remember the day he said that “The human baby needs someone who is gaga in love with him or her during the first two years of life.” I have since studied the neuroscience of trauma and of newborns and infants and attachment from Harry Harlow forward to today.
How is this so denied and diminished? How is this not the standard for every baby? I bet you every one of the people in this photo was born in the hospital, with mother’s physiology controlled — managed — with drugs (epidural has fentanyl since the 80s, did you know?), with biology and physiology-contradicting rules, with time restraints, and with interventions. And, these precious babies in the photo were likely separated immediately from their mother’s body and their placenta and blood — because the medical folks believe that the placenta and mother’s body become a baby killer at birth. Is there anything more misogynist? Then the wounded mother must contort herself into an emotional mindfuckery pretzel to believe that it is ok for her to go to work and her baby to be separated at 6 weeks, maybe 2–4, or if lucky, three months, so she can leave her precious babies to go back to work.
How many of the precious babies in this photo were in stranger child care or with grandparents or others by 6 weeks and beyond so their mother could go to her “real job” — barely making enough or clearing enough? Why is it ok for a woman to be paid to care for children in a mostly government-funded institution, as long as it is not her own baby? I believe it is misogyny that underlies the lack of regard for the babies. As long as we ignore babies' rights because it might help a woman, elevate her, give her money for not really working a “real job”, and justifies abortion, we are funding war and a police state.
What jobs could they have, could there be, if we funded precious babies to have the love, safety, and support they need during their limbic, emotional brain, developmental period? If we insured that every baby’s mother had a home, security, food, and support so she could focus on emotional limbic brain development for every future adult? For at least one year, preferably 2 years.
I am talking every baby, equally. Every human baby has the same physiological, emotional, spiritual need to be cared for by a functional, resourced mother in the nest of a community of healthy adults and children. We create true justice and equality — or injustice — in the first two year of a human’s life. Babies of mothers with minimum wages jobs (that are very necessary to the functioning of our culture) are just as important as mothers of high-paying jobs. Poverty, racism, sexism, all the isms, war, and systems of war can be ended by providing for EVERY human baby to be care for by a functional mother and family.
We need to stop harming every human being who comes to this planet, introducing them to disconnect, pain, separation, fear, and lack immediately. And, we need for those of us who have been harmed to heal our early emotional brain. Edited to add the link to the anthology, WOMB TO THRIVE: The Missing Keys to Heal Yourself, Your Family and the Planet. I wrote Chapter 5: It’s The Babies Birth.
So stop defending your experience of giving birth or being born in the obstetrical industrial complex, stop complying with the people and institutions who are known to create the worst outcomes in the world at the greatest financial costs. US medical obstetrics is ranked in the 50s for maternal and safety. And, the US is the only industrialized nation to not provide extended leave from work so that babies can have their mothers during this prime developmental time.
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