Corn Mother Easy Access Reproductive Health Clinic
Over the years, the Changing Woman Initiative has emerged as a trailblazing entity, igniting conversation across Indian Country, as well as globally, on what is equitable access for women and their reproductive rights. CWI has utilized this opportunity to inform and identify how to ensure that Native women are empowered to make healthy lifestyle choices on accessing health care services for themselves and their children, pre-and postnatal. Therefore, we created the Corn Mother Easy Access Women’s Health Clinic.
The purpose of the Changing Woman Initiative and the Women’s Health Clinic is to draw on cultural strengths to renew indigenous birth knowledge and healing through holistic approaches and community empowerment. While one of our focuses is the future development of a culturally centered reproductive wellness and birth center, we saw the present need to create a physical space for education and healing for Native American women. The Corn Mother Easy Access Women’s Health Clinic will help reclaim cultural identities through birth and motherhood that have been shaped by our cultures. Our work in bringing the birth center to fruition is to begin with creating immediate access to women’s health services.
What is an Easy Access Clinic?
A safe space to receive reproductive health care regardless of ability to pay, pending insurance or experiencing crises, with easy-to-schedule appointments, even on the same day. Services we provide include:
- Well Women’s Health Exams – pap smears and breast exams
- STD/STI screening & treatment
- Birth control education & consultation
- Pregnancy testing
- Prenatal Care
- Postpartum care
- Referral to specialists
- Plant medicine education & consultation
- Traditional Medicine & Healing
- Breastfeeding support
Connect with our clinic
Office Hours:
Monday – Friday: 9 am – 5 pm
Easy Access Clinic:
Wednesdays 9 am – 5 pm
Our Background
Today, there is not a place providing equitable, thoughtful and culturally relevant women’s reproductive health care for Indigenous women in the United States. If ” [m]aternal mortality is a human rights crisis in the United States…[with] the maternal mortality ratio in the U.S. more than doubled from 12 to 28 maternal deaths out of every 100,000 live births,” where does it leave Native American women specifically? With continued budget cuts, staffing reductions and unavailable resources, Indian Health Services (IHS) is no longer meeting the needs of its constituents, thus minimizing their function for existence to provide comprehensive and culturally relevant health care for Native Americans, and in New Mexico specifically for Native American women.
For example, in 2009, the Santa Fe IHS facility closed its doors and is no longer providing prenatal care, after 30 weeks, and birth services for Native women. Instead these women were asked to sign up for Medicaid and transfer care to a private health care provider to deliver at one of the three surrounding hospitals. For the Native women residing among the 8 Pueblo nations in Northern New Mexico, this request is catastrophic to ensure that Native women are accessing and receiving the necessary care during their pregnancies in two key ways. 1) Traveling longer distances to receive care is problematic as many Native peoples live at or below the poverty line with little to no expendable resources; and 2) non-native facilities lack cultural sensitivity adding stressors to an already stressful situation and/or causing the mother to discontinue her prenatal care.