2022 ACNM Excellence in Leadership & Innovation Award
On Tuesday, an absolutely lovely thing happened. I won the Excellence in Leadership and Innovation award from the American College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM) I’m so honored to share this award with many midwives whose innovations and revolutions are inspirations to us all - see the previous award winners here.
I’m deeply in love with midwifery and being a midwife. I’m so grateful to do this work alongside so many. And I am beyond proud to have started Feminist Midwife almost ten years ago. It’s really special to be recognized by my own community in this way.
Here is the speech I wrote and read when I received the award. Thanks to previous years’ virtual meeting and the award winner before me (dear friend Simon Adriane Ellis) being notified with enough time to write a speech, I was given the same heads-up so I could say a few words! As a writer I am so grateful to have had the time to write what I wanted to say.
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Thank you to my dear friends Simon Adriane Ellis and Francie Likis for nominating me for this award. Thank you to my amazing wife Lindsay for your love and support, the best midwife wife around. And most poignantly thank you to Kitty Ernst for her life and continued legacy that created a pathway for all of us to celebrate innovative leadership.
I am truly honored and emotional to be receiving this acknowledgement. Since I was in my first year of midwifery school I’ve understood this award to be a recognition of midwifery agitators, revolutionaries, and radicals. That is how I’ve understood midwifery to be, as a philosophy, an ethic, and a movement.
I am both a midwife and an activist. I engage in midwifery activism through writing, whether in journals or on social media - unlike Professor Loretta Ross, my twat does tweet, and often. I engage in midwifery activism through protest, whether in the streets of Chicago or in the elevator lobbies at this meeting. I engage in midwifery activism through teaching, especially in challenging my community to understand trauma informed care and consent as pedagogy rather than just buzzwords. And finally I engage in midwifery activism through listening to others who are oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised within this community so that I may understand the fight to which we are all called, uplift their voices and work, stand beside them and work with them when invited, to speak truth to power and affect change. There is significant work to be done to transform midwifery into a welcome, inclusive, representative space for everyone. We as an organization are fortunate that midwives of color, trans and nonbinary midwives, and queer midwives like myself continue to show up here, despite so many harms, for so many years, with not enough change in not enough time. The future includes all of us, if only we midwife it to be so.
As many of you know my wife and I have been through a heartbreaking year and a half. Despite the devastating personal losses, first of my brother and most recently of my mother in law who was an absolutely magical person, I am also professionally grieving taking a break from clinical practice. Being away from directly caring for people in a time where we are told we can’t say the words of our truths like gay and trans, when life saving gender affirming care and life saving abortion care are criminally restricted, and while this pandemic rages on and the world burns, is a true source of grief for me. At the same time, I love the doctoral work I’m doing now in health care ethics and consent in intimate exams, particularly seeking to translate what I view as feminist and queer midwifery through just another name of ethical practice. I love the work I continue to do to train all providers in abortion care. And I truly am honored to do the work I’ve created around Feminist Midwife in all of the iterations that have come in the last ten years.
Earlier today I spent time with a recent midwifery graduate, and we began talking about how a call to midwifery, an identity of midwifery, is not enough. We must really work to get midwifery right, all the time. Being out of clinical practice means that I have more time. It means that I’m well slept. And it means that I have the capacity to keep telling y’all how we can be better. So my midwifery activism has only just begun. Thank you.
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