"The Birth Attendants" is a 37-minute animated documentary named after the Olympia, Washington-based volunteer organization that provides support for mothers and pregnant women in prison. This is part 1 of 5.
The film primarily features interviews with incarcerated women at various stages of pregnancy and motherhood while serving sentences at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. These interviews are supplemented with additional discussions among the Birth Attendants volunteer doulas.
According to census data, 2-4% of women are pregnant at any time, and the same is true for women in prison. The number of women in prison has increased by 832% between 1977 and 2007, and 80% of women in prison are mothers of children under the age of 18. Since 2002, the Birth Attendants, an Olympia, Washington-based nonprofit organization of volunteer doulas, have provided pregnancy support, labor assistance, and post-partum care for over 500 incarcerated women through their Prison Doula Project.
It costs over $42,000 per year to incarcerate each woman at WCCW, with the most common admissions offense category being drug crimes. (More difficult to determine is what percentage of other types of crimes, such as the second-most common admissions offense, property crimes, are themselves drug-related.) Also difficult to track are the long-term effects of mothers being separated from their children, and communities being fragmented as a result of imprisonment. Children of incarcerated parents currently comprise over 2% of all minors. More than half of all incarcerated women have past experiences of physical or sexual abuse, and women who are survivors of these types of abuse are more likely to become involved with drugs. Within the film, one of the Birth Attendants eloquently makes the important point that there should be a shift in allocation of resources away from prisons in order to address problems like drug addiction, mental illness, domestic violence and sexual abuse first and foremost as health care issues, in order to prevent crimes rather than dismissively filing these issues away until crimes are committed. In the meantime, while we decide whether or not to address these issues or merely to push them away, there are real, present needs that the Birth Attendants are addressing. The Birth Attendants are an exemplary organization whose activities deserve to be publicly highlighted, and they can serve as models and advisers to other people around the country who are interested in starting similar organizations.
As the filmmaker, I sought to minimize my own on-screen presence aside from providing explanatory context about the Birth Attendants and the Residential Parenting Program at WCCW. Rather, my approach was to function as a facilitator in bringing through the experiences and analyses of directly affected individuals not only the Birth Attendants themselves, but even more so, the women in prison who spoke with me, as they expressed their experiences within the criminal justice system. The structure of the film was developed through multiple meetings with the Birth Attendants, who then arranged the interviews at the prison during their weekly class sessions. The resulting film is free from the sensational content of other prison documentary films and series, and provides a rare opportunity for audiences to listen to the voices, experiences and analyses of women and mothers in prison. The Birth Attendants film features a diverse array of women from low-income communities and communities of color in both rural and urban areas of Washington.
Why present a documentary in animated form? The animated representations of people provide them with some degree of privacy upon their release from prison, while at the same time clearly communicating their ethnicities, general ages, and personalities via their gestures and expressions.
For more information on the making of this film, please visit my site at www.zoonbats.com/birth_attendants.
For more information on the Birth Attendants, please visit www.birthattendants.com.
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The Birth Attendants (Part 2 of 5)by Zoyous172 views
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