Settler Midwifery: A Colonial Tool in Canada's Reproductive Healthcare System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The land we call Canada is a settler colonial country where reproductive healthcare is used as a mechanism to control, subjugate, and erase Indigenous people and to advance the White settler state. Healthcare providers play an integral role in the healthcare system and contribute to Canada's colonization. In this piece, we critically analyze how settler midwifery is complicit with colonialism in reproductive healthcare by exploring the history of midwifery in Canada, midwifery education, and contemporary settler midwifery. DISCUSSION: European settlers omitted the history of Indigenous midwifery in Canada and to justify their erasure, they conceptualized Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized and their birthing practices as substandard. To establish a colonial healthcare system, settler midwives replaced traditional Indigenous birth attendants. When midwifery became regulated, midwives were required to train in formal post-secondary institutions that sustain colonial logics, systems, and practices. Midwifery education programs maintain colonialism by reinforcing medicalized Western practices and sustaining barriers to the growth of Indigenous midwifery. As a result, Western birthing practices are widespread among settler midwives and Indigenous Peoples face barriers to comprehensive and culturally sensitive care. To decolonize Canadian midwifery, we must dismantle stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples and their birthing practices in historical narratives, implement an anti-colonial approach to midwifery education, support Indigenous midwives in returning birth home, and improve the provision of culturally sensitive care. CONCLUSION: Settler midwifery in Canada is complicit in colonialism; building anti-colonial alliances can help support Indigenous midwives in leading a decolonial future for reproduction and birthing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".