- 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 – 4 pm
Western Region: Mondays
Metro Area: Tuesdays
Northern Region: Wednesdays
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.