- Prenatal care
- Birth services
- Indigenous Doula support
- Nutrition consultation & access to healthy produce with visits
- Lactation assessment, support & education
- Postpartum care up to 6 weeks for mom and baby
- Prenatal, birth, and postpartum plant medicine-making bundle
- Traditional medicine referral, meats, plant medicine, supplements
Our White Shell Woman birth services strive to ensure access to decolonized, Indigenous-centered, accessible healthcare and traditional childbirth options. CWI intentionally strives to center Indigenous families, hold space for other Black and Brown families, and also offer care to those who could not otherwise access midwifery care. While our midwives focus on community birth, we support families regardless of birthplace.
Traditional
supporting families with access to plant medicine & ceremony, education on traditional birth practices, and collaborative care with Indigenous birth keepers.
Birth Sanctuary
providing a “home away from home” birth experience, along with postpartum meals and a safe sanctuary for rest for the early days of postpartum.
Community Birth
central to the services CWI provides is supporting families planning for a home birth, focusing on sovereignty, comfort, and safety for healthy pregnancies.
Hospital Birth
Supporting families who prefer or need to birth in a hospital setting through co-care with other clinicians, doula support, and home-based postpartum & newborn visits.
Connect with our clinic
Office Hours:
Monday – Friday: 9 am – 5 pm
Easy Access Clinic:
Wednesdays 9 am – 5 pm
According to the 2013 Health Equity Report on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, Native American women continue to have the highest rate (with over 44 out of 100) having received no prenatal care or initiated prenatal care after the first trimester. The NM DOH Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System from 2012 also reported that 32% of NA had inadequate prenatal care, and 20% of those women who had Medicaid had inadequate prenatal care (attended less than 50% of prenatal visits).
We at Changing Woman Initiative are on a mission to renew cultural birth knowledge to empower and reclaim indigenous sovereignty of women’s medicine and lifeway teachings to promote wellness. We are also aware that over the last 20 years, Native American women’s maternal health disparities have been well documented, but little effort has been made by way of centering Native American women to address these issues.
The top three reasons this occurs are:
- No Medicaid card at the time of appointment,
- lack of transportation
- lack of education on why prenatal care is important.
The challenge that the Changing Woman Initiative has undertaken is to address these known healthcare delivery gaps for Native American women in New Mexico through the creation of culturally centered home birth services that would integrate traditional teachings and plant medicine knowledge.
Target Areas and Population
- Serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Indigenous women living in or around Santa Fe, NM.
- Pueblos: Pojoaque, Tesuque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Ohkay Owingeh, Nambe, Picuris, Taos, Jemez, Santa Domingo, San Ildefonso
- Albuquerque area and the Navajo Nation.
Our Background
In the spring of 2018, the Changing Woman Initiative hosted 8 talking circles in 6 of the Northern NM Pueblo communities to discuss traditional birth practices and access to birth services. In several of the communities, women reported wanting to have a home birth, but this option was not available to them in their community because of a lack of providers or if it was available, it was financially out of reach for them.
In 2007, Tewa Women United interviewed 131 women as part of a Maternal and Child Health Needs Assessment. 49.6% would like their cultural practices integrated into their birthing experience. 44.1% felt their prenatal care provider was not culturally sensitive. 41.7% felt that the labor and delivery staff were not culturally sensitive. These statistics were reported in 2007, but in 2018, women in our talking circles were reporting birth trauma and obstetrical violence in their birth experiences, followed by postpartum depression and feeling helpless about where to go for support.
Three Sisters Nutrition & Farmer Collaborative
Changing Woman Initiative acknowledges that traditional food systems have long supported the health and well-being of our communities. In serving Native American and Indigenous families, CWI believes in community partnerships with Native American/Indigenous farms to create pathways forgetting traditionally grown foods to the tables of growing families, without the common barriers of federally funded food programs. We believe that re-introducing nutritional traditional foods to the next generation through pregnancy will have a long-term impact on decreasing preventable health conditions like diabetes and obesity. It also will strengthen the relationship between Native American mothers and the land, which is supporting the growth of their babies.
Background
Food shortages have been documented amongst Native American populations in New Mexico from as early as the mid-1600s. Since then, Native Americans have been making voluntary and involuntary changes to their diets as a result of the availability of food and the use of commodity foods. There are multiple sources over the years linking food insecurity to preventable health conditions like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and some cancer conditions. On a national scale, food insecurity trends for native Americans continue to increase. Despite policies intended to expand food assistance programs, Native Americans are still twice as likely to be food insecure compared to whites. The high cost of healthy, nutrition-dense foods, coupled with limited availability and selection in low-income communities, contributes to food insecurity. Further, the complexity and ability to navigate access to food assistance programs are also linked to food insecurity causes.
Despite federally funded food programs, Native American families still experience food insecurity. In 2010 the Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring System reported that 17% of Native American women reported not having enough food to eat during their pregnancy and that 16% of women with WIC did not have enough foo