Whose Body Is It

Covered in this episode:

• Mary Lou Singleton’s call to serve women in birth and her experience watching midwifery turn into a standardized profession 

• Critiquing medicalized midwifery and those who adhere to Science™

• Unassisted Childbirth v. Free Birth Dogma

• What happens when transferring to the hospital unnecessarily becomes the worst thing that could happen in your birth? 

• The virtue of heroism in midwifery 

• Why Mary Lou supports the voluntary licensure model 

• Factors of homebirth death including breech and twins (highlighting two important studies) 

• The commodification of free birth “cool girl culture” what happens when you follow a trend instead of your intuition 

• What happens when women don’t get empowering risk assessment from either side of the birth pendulum? 

• Recommendations for women to tap into their intuition: To free birth or not to free birth?

• The role of responsibility for birth attendants 

• What in the world should an aspiring birth attendant do? Where can she learn? Who can she learn from?

• The value of having a woman at your birth who is willing to climb Everest with you  

Today's guest, Kimberly Ann Johnson author of the best selling book The Fourth Trimester, works at the intersection of sex, birth, and trauma. Kimberly entered menopause in 2020 and, just as she had with postpartum and motherhood, began to explore this unique phase of female mammalian life with curiosity and spiritual sensitivity. The standard of perimenopause care -synthetic hormones commonly known as HRT - immediately struck her as out of order with her trust in female physiology. In this episode we examine the accusations of menopausal care negligence not just for refusing HRT, or radical ‘hormone-balancing’ diet regimens, but even down to beauty practices like face yoga and gua sha. Kimberly shares critical analysis of the pathology of women's reproductive life phases and suggests that menopause uninterrupted is the death rehearsal, inviting us to live more biologically.

At 21, Emily was sure that by getting married and having kids she would more or less wind up living happily ever after. However, her relationship replicated some of her core wounds around growing up in a coercive control environment, and where talks around money were taboo. Emily wanted to leave her marriage, but all she had to her name was her car. In this time, she went back to school and got a degree in Women & Gender studies and with the analysis of Bell Hooks and Angela Davis, and the iron will earned from free birthing her second baby, she was finally ready to leave her abuser. It was only in the divorce process that she realized the full extent of the financial and physical abuse she survived.

Emily began fundraising to help support other mothers fighting for freedom from abusive marriages. Now, she’s turned that into the Mama Wilder Nonprofit. Along the way, she fell in love again with a man who in the truest sense is a protector and provider. This time she may not have had the pure idealism she had in her youth, but she knew that she deserved a redemptive love story, birth, and postpartum. In this episode Emily speaks to the importance of women initiating potentially uncomfortable conversations around prenups, property ownership, and life insurance policies with their partners.

Natasha Vargas was a journalist, union organizer and classic leftist when she took on the topic of gender ideology. A beat reporter for Out, Jezebel, Vice (among many other leftist publications) she even sympathetically covered the entree of Fallon Fox into women’s MMA (he is the trans-identified male who would later become known for splitting lesbian fighter Tamikka Brents’ skull open). Through her journalism on this topic, as well as following what was happening in women-only colleges, she came to have a critical view of gender, but she hardly planned to make “TERF” content her main focus. After publishing in the American Conservative in 2017, she was canceled and fired from her dream job, as vitriolic lies spread about her online.

It wasn’t until she became a mother in 2021 that she truly peaked in her understanding of the differences between men and women. She is now “in devotion to the dyad,” organizing to protect physiological birth and breastfeeding and organizing against corporations that profit off the separation of mother and baby. Natasha is the founder of the Radical Moms Union, which stands for three things: biological norms over cultural demands, attachment over independence, and the mother-baby dyad. Despite these super pointed core values, her organization still manages to have a very diverse membership and leadership. Natasha’s message is an echo of second-wave feminism that’s the perfect combination of militant and matrifocal.