Births That Birth Births

This project came to life as part of my Transdisciplinary Design MFA thesis and would not have been possible without the help and guidance from the program's faculty and my fellow students.

Founded on researching systems, strategies, and tactics developed by new parents, Births That Birth Births critiques constructs governing newly-formed families through bespoke design tools and liberatory processes of imagining alternative pasts, presents, and futures. Desk research, semi-structured interviews with new parents, and engagements with design probes assisted in peeling and portioning entangled layers of complexity into several key areas: distorted relationships to time, uncertainty, and a need for paid leave that adheres to the unique conditions of parents and families. Ultimately, the research engaged with reproductive justice frameworks through a speculative alternative history lens. This project, told in nine parts, takes an oscillating approach to synthesis and depth-finding prototypes--uncovering meaning in the quantitative data, qualitative information, and insights to create provocative artifacts assisting participants on a journey toward articulating a more preferred present.

Reproductive justice is a critical, theoretical framework that centers on three areas: the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments.(1) BTBB focuses on the latter of the three, the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments, asking: 

How might we (new parents) build infrastructure that both dismantles the current cumbersome systems creating barriers to safe and healthy environments for families and unveils ways we might be able to bolster the diverse needs of families?

As a country founded on euro-centric and white supremacy, systems of oppression are complexly integrated into all structures governing society, and as a result, justice movements tend to overlap, intersect, and share commonalities that aid many analogous movements and frameworks. The reproductive justice space is no different; by focusing on safe and healthy environments, reproductive justice illuminates intersectionality within its own movement and other movements focused on alleviating the world of white supremacy within the housing, climate, racial, LGBTQ+, and many other justice movements.

"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." 

— Audre Lorde (2)

It became evident that when designing out of entrenched repressive systems, one must consider the tension, conditioning, and lopsidedness that solutioning can upheave. As a result of societal constructs, unlearning is often more difficult than learning. For example, one participant mentioned their concerns that having access to a lenient care-led leave policy on a mass scale would "encourage abuses within an already abused system." Although people might take advantage of a system, it is not our responsibility to police the possible but, rather, to stand up with those who struggle and create structures that support and elevate the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. Furthermore, It is the argument of this work that we, as a society, center on care, as long as it does not create harm for families. 

Why should people of privilege have disproportionate access to paid leave?  

Who and what stands to gain when society strips people of their fundamental right to parent and care for their family? 

Even under the best circumstances available to U.S. citizens by their government, the systems and lack of safeguards create structural failures that create unsafe environments for families. It is only those families with large safety nets that seem to transition into parenthood with ease. These safety nets come in many forms, but the most common ones mentioned by participants were nearby family and substantial employer paid leave. One participant in this research who had access to significant paid leave through their work and their child had a common, treatable affliction that went undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed for the first six weeks of life said: "Paid leave makes all the difference in the world. It is so stressful having a newborn, and, I would say, the first three months were incredibly stressful and chaotic, and so many days, I would think, how could we do this and anything else? How could we do this and one more thing?" Paid leave buoyed their lives and enabled them to create a safe and healthy environment for their child, providing less worry and more space to focus on ideal treatments. It allowed them to prioritize their child's needs while in a highly vulnerable state.

“Your choices can be right for you but also not necessarily the best choices for other people. Why? You are not other people. Your circumstances differ. Your preferences differ. In the language of economics, your constraints differ.”

— Emily Oster , Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool (3)

Paid leave for all is central to providing families with a healthy foundational space to grow, build confidence, and navigate the newness associated with safe child-rearing. It is difficult to make sense of who these stringent policies serve when the statistics offer such glaring disparities between those with employer-provided paid leave and those that do not have employer-provided paid leave. Often still healing from the physical trauma of giving birth; a quarter of all birthing parents return to work just ten days after giving birth.(4). Childcare is difficult for many in this situation, considering the vast majority of daycare and nanny services in NYC and the U.S. will not accept infants under eight weeks old. That is 46 days without care for an infant. Although each human and birth is different, the first three months are referred to as the fourth trimester. The fourth trimester is when infants are still developing muscle, fat surpluses, and critical attributes that allow us to navigate the new world we inhabit.(5)  In the early weeks of the fourth trimester, many participants expressed a need for a wide berth between their new lives and the burdens associated with work and other irrelevant tasks that once populated their lives.

Care-led leave would accommodate the time it takes for the birthing parent to heal, attain the care they and their family need, and not compound their situation with additional stress. Further, by providing a non-birthing parent with paid leave, the societal constraints and stigmatization associated with providing care would be softened and encourage a sense of equality and equal responsibility by not prioritizing one person's work over another's due to the leave they are provided.(6) In heteronormative marriages and relationships, care is more often provided by women, an expectation fertilized with the first leave taken and further expected when a family member needs additional support after befalling an illness or accident.(7)  Building structures and policies that shoulder care primarily on people that are not men ostracizes a swath of people (men) from accessing and strengthening their abilities to care for others. Men are capable of care; however, it may take individual and societal deconditioning and unlearning to accept and embrace the notion of shared care. The responsibility of care must be more evenly distributed if we aspire toward a more equitable society that prioritizes safe and healthy environments for families.(6)

The semi-structured interviews with new parents provided a glimpse into a world experienced moment-to-moment in both singular and plural contexts as many of them learn their caregiving roles for the first time. Some new parents engaged with emotional multitudes while grappling with their newly expanded lives after shifting from the pre-parent lives they were accustomed to, unveiling a fresh dimensional aspect of humanity for the first time. Addressing and understanding the emotions associated with this change for some participants was effortless. For others, it was, as one participant said, "layers of self were shedding into dust, swept into corners, and dealt with in time as I slowly became new within a shell of the past. Through the birth of my child, I too was birthed into parenthood, and from this new sense of being and restructuring of life blossomed." Like a child learning to use their hands, some parents developed new communication methods and systems to check in and textually convey each day's needs and wants to their partner(s). By identifying and naming their needs and wants, each parent could support the other in achieving their hopes and increase their daily gratification through petite victories. Some parents found that a talk-it-through approach of small discussions exposed points of intersectional needs, interests, and actions and sought ways in which they might address them together. Other parents brought skills, tools, and methods learned in their professional and social lives to assist in managing the newness they were experiencing. One accountant collected their baby's inputs and outputs into a spreadsheet and correlated that information with weight and length growth into a sparkline, denoting the progress into a quantitative data-driven outcome. Normal in this space is immeasurable and irrelevant; these are all equally remarkable modes of care. The gravitational pull to comfortable spaces and processes in times of richly pronounced uncertainty says quite a bit about what provides comfort and how we make sense of the world. Nestled into the comfortable spaces of knowing that parents often lean toward can help imbue confidence in people and help craft hacks to ease into the domestic activities associated with early childcare.

Building confidence to care for others, self, and ask for care is particularly emergent in the early days of parenthood. For some, confidence to care arrives through the foundation that parents have built into their relationships ahead of becoming parents. For others, the catalyst of child care and being responsible for another person's wellbeing strengthened their relationships and increased their ability to define care.  

Interactions with authority figures regarding the infant's condition and what successes, benchmarks, and milestones they reach in a "timely" manner can also significantly affect a new parent's sense of confidence. Pediatricians, specialists, and the caregivers'/parents' families can buttress or erode their aplomb depending on their reactions, actions, and the words and tone they use in conveying information. Critique absent of context became proverbial thorns sticking several parents' sides, as did a dismissive all-knowing approach that discounted their lived experience without considering the harm this approach might create.

In contrast, those receiving physical or in-person non-judgemental support from their families and authority figures could navigate uncertainty easier than those not receiving such support. The parents of some new parents provided context on how they were taken care of in the early days saying, "this is how I swaddled you when we came home from the hospital." Affirming notions of transgenerational care and reminding the new parent(s) that, at one point, no one could hold their heads up on their own. Nevertheless, they are swaddling another generation and preparing their child for what lies ahead. Human life has come so far and, still, many new parents question the most natural of processes and instincts, second-guessing whether what they do is an optimal form of care for the people who depend on them. Space to learn and unlearn is critical as people reach their new plateau of parenthood, look out on the terrain ahead, and pick a path coursing their way through a labyrinth of choice, advice, and opinion regarding their family. The different approaches parents took in the early days of parenting showed a plurality of successful, self-confidence-inducing parenting strategies. It is paramount that society embraces and supports the many ways parents cultivate safe and healthy environments for their families.(8) 

Paid leave is a right in most of the world; the U.S. is one of six countries and by far the largest (U.S. population: 329.5 million in 2020), with the next most populated being Papua New Guinea (population: 8.9 million in 2020), that does not provide paid parental leave. Despite the vast majority of the world having access to paid leave, it is an apparition to seventy-seven percent of Americans.(10). For most Americans privileged enough to receive paid leave, it is provided to parents at the employer's expense and often coupled with an unwavering expiration date. Six states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws that guarantee the right to paid leave. However, all of the policies in these six states are contingent on eligibility requirements and require the employer, not the government, to pay for the employees' leave. The duration, payment cap, and access to paid leave vary in each state offering paid leave.(11) (12) Some states offer as little as five weeks, and the most extended leave is a mere twelve weeks. Twelve weeks is still four weeks before a baby can support themselves on their elbows, sixteen weeks before many babies begin to crawl, and forty weeks before most babies begin to walk.(11) (12) (13) While these laws are providing much-needed relief for new parents, the financial burden should ideally come from the government and not encourage a system of discrimination between employers and employees. Despite laws ensuring some states provide paid leave, only twenty-three percent of the working population in the U.S. have access to paid parental leave. Paid leave in the U.S. is designed to be a privilege that favors those with a higher income over those with a lower income. A worker in the top twenty-five percent income earning bracket is four times more likely to receive paid leave than those in the bottom twenty-five percent. This broken system forces twenty-five percent of birthing parents to return to work within ten days of giving birth.

The U.S. is One of Six Countries In The World That Does Not Offer Paid Leave.

19 out of 20 low wage workers do not receive any type of paid leave.

(14)

Why do we base parental leave on clock and calendar time when every person's journey toward parenthood is unique?  

Is there another more apt metric or flexible means of providing leave that would accommodate people's diverse needs?

For the sake of this work, clock time is not a philosophical time theory; clock time references "the time," a series of numbers on a wall or a wrist. Despite it being displayed cyclically, time is usually measured linearly. Clock time is a relatively new technology within human existence, with the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time across Great Britain in December of 1847.(18)  Nevertheless, we measure and entrust this youthful metric without regard to previous ways of articulating time through circadian means. The expansion of clock time into a calendar format is also simply a series of numbers – a mode of domesticating our present world's industrialization and capitalistic intentions. Failing to capture experiences that define peoples' (and every other organisms') existence because they are numbers without nuance renders clock time a ridiculous means to measure healing, especially for events yet to happen. Humans have been conditioned to have a relationship to these numbers despite their inflexibility – people trust clock time because, for the most part, it is how people in our current era have always related to and rationalized time. While we might know how we experience time due to our prior experiences, we do not know how we will experience the unforeseeable in relation to time. Nevertheless, all seventeen percent of businesses that provide paid leave craft policies with a preordained expiration date that does not consider the vast differences and challenges many parents face. Several participants mentioned feeling severe and harmful pressure that increased as they approached the end of their leave.  

What if, instead of expiring, the end of leave was designed as a graduation into the next phase of life? 

Contrary to the rigidity of clock time, a span of care is permeable, and it folds around the fluidity of experience. Care is the analog to time's incrementally digital essence. Crafting accommodations for new parents, a span of care is an additive process, carving time away from what once occupied their livelihoods and allowing them to mold the newfound excess into a more desirable form. In addition, shifting from a span of care adds a degree of autonomy over one's time and ownership over how their time is spent in both physical and mental capacities, providing new parents with bandwidth to expand towards care for themselves, their newborns, and others. Instead of expiring, a span of care would center on the notion of graduating into the next phase of familial relationships. The speculative graduation date (discussed in more depth in part seven of this project) is a decision made by a doctor regarding the infants' need to be socialized and the parents' fitness. Through the insights gathered from new parents, this work argues that if we are to prioritize families, the paid leave system should not be constrained to clocks and calendars. Instead, parental leave should exist on a span of care that considers the family as parts and a whole, not in the absence of their labor in the workforce, but in entering a new phase of being–a union with their futures.

In the U.S. healthcare system, clock time is often a way to make sense and find a universal measure of distance to and from the healing horizon. Seeking familiar spaces in uncertain times can be comforting, but those spaces can also create unfulfilled expectations. Most patients want to know when they will feel better, when normalcy will return, or when the situation might worsen. However, the healing duration is relative to factors not simply indicative of the (un)treatable condition, yet we look for hope contextualized within the numbers. Speculating how long our transition or healing might take is based on the knowledge acquired from the care providers' practice and the body of knowledge that accompanies medicine. However, every person is different–their life is in context and plural. They do not live in isolation with their current situation, and it might be challenging to articulate their life circumstances in an abbreviated conversation with their care provider. Rather, people live in concert with others and consume knowns and unknowns; they exist in ways the care setting might not be conducive to articulating or understanding; care recipients do not live in a few shared sentences.

The irrelevance of clock time as a construct is evident in the early days of parenting when existence is portioned into the infant's sleep cycles, playtime, wake windows, feedings, diaper changes, and the brief spaces between them. Infants sleep in short, frequent increments splicing the revolution around the sun into more than eight different repeatable cycles and rapidly retuning the parents' internal clocks to a distant, unfamiliar pattern. No participant in this project that had access to paid leave centered time on themselves while in the early months of parenting; instead, it was as though the parents no longer had a sense of autonomous ownership of time. Furthermore, some first-time parents found a rhythmic relationship to time by living myopically, feeding-to-feeding, action-to-action, and nap-to-nap. This new mode of being and living in time forced reactionary instincts to overtake the parents. They built systems and redesigned their lives for comfort and efficiency as they repositioned furniture, understood new needs for themselves and their family, constructed relationships with networks of other parents, and hierarchically ranked and addressed domestic tasks. Seemingly everything was a negotiation of merits and will as they weighed the present and the possibilities of what may come. As one parent said, "I once looked at new parents and thought how small their lives must be, but now, having become a parent myself, I can see that parenthood reduces the noise and clutter that I should never have given my time to in the first place." With the fullness of life unbound and in-flux restructuring the spaces and ways of being, new parents found liberation from the superfluous trappings of their former pre-parent selves.

Shifting perspective from access to paid leave and rejecting clock time as a means of articulating leave to materializing preferable paid parental leave with participants provides a unique vantage point into how new parents occupy time. This process provides agency to parents to dream into what might be possible with a care-led leave policy—positing a line of inquiry that addresses a preferable structure of care on a timeline oxidizes the general necessities and interactions new parents have with their inherited roles. By morphing power dynamics, leave became something that was no longer a guilt-filled luxury gifted by corporations; rather, it became a right that participants could nest their needs and specifications into a liberatory map guiding people toward confident parenting.

Recalling the pungent memories of early parenting, participants focused on when they needed time to resolve conflicts, temper friction points, and moments worth sinking into that were short-lived due to their pre-parent lives congesting and complicating their transition to parenthood. When redesigning leave, some new parents said that they would prefer to elongate paid leave into the pre-birth stage so that they could soften their transition and prepare for parenthood. Other parents focused on a rhythmic leave that allowed them to exit and enter the workforce as needed, tapering and undulating their schedule from part-time to full-time. Many participants spoke about friends and family who would greatly benefit from flexible leave that would accommodate struggles, hardships, and unforeseeable realities that strained and exacerbated an already stressful situation. Regardless of the differences in the bespoke leave schedules designed with participants, the parents all said that they believed that leave could be better designed to center families and, if so, would help create a better sense of unity and fortitude for the futures they will soon embark on together as a family.

In making the leap from access to leave instilled with an expiration date to that of a preferred leave constructed around care and their lives, participants meandered through timelines and tailored leave needs. For example, some parents began discussing events four months after they became a parent and jumped back to the first week before discussing the actions that might demand leave six weeks post-birth. No parent spoke of this from a singularly linear perspective of time; the events bubbled into the conversations. Reaffirming that clock time is irrelevant in care spaces, the sporadic, non-linear calendar was constructed by a hierarchy of events that the participants' organized into a highlight reel focusing on the relevant events and transcended the order of clock and calendar time.

At First Sight

Designed to show users how babies see the world, At First Sight transports users to a time when they, too, could not exist on their own.

A Hope For a Future

“Happiness, small moments, content, simple, sunny, irregular-day, soda, shorts, appreciating, warm skin, middle-of-the-day, easy, nice, fresh-laundry, grapefruit, Black-cherry, Turquoise-blue, Cézanne, post-Impressionism, melting-blob”