{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,26]],"date-time":"2025-08-26T06:10:25Z","timestamp":1756188625157,"version":"3.44.0"},"reference-count":32,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,26]],"date-time":"2025-08-26T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1756166400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Glob. Women\u2019s Health"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Obstetric violence, rooted in the racialised and gendered logics of colonial medicine, has long served as a tool for disciplining reproductive bodies. In both 19th-century Antebellum slavery and the Cape colony, Black women's bodies became sites of medical experimentation, regulation, and control. Gynaecology emerged as a site of race-making, displacing Black autonomous midwives and erasing their knowledge from official medical archives. Yet this erasure was never complete. In Eldorado Park, Black autonomous midwives, or voetvroue, have cultivated grounded, place-based forms of reproductive care: treating infertility, facilitating births, and enacting rituals transmitted along familial and communal lines. Drawing on archival research and life history interviews, this paper traces the erasure of \u201cvoetvroue\u201d, or Black autonomous midwives, from the medical archive and discusses the colonial transformation of birth and obstetrics into a site of surveillance, control, and violence. It follows the lives of three voetvroue\u2014Aunty Faeeza, Aunt Rose, and their grandmother, Ouma\u2014who re-fashioned her two-bedroom backroom in Eldorado Park into a birthing space, or \u201chospitaal\u201d. I argue that the huis-hospitaal constitutes a radical commons of care that offers a counter-space to colonial biomedical logics not through overt refusal but through the everyday enactment of pleasure, dignity, and agency. Here, pleasure is conceptualised as emotional, spiritual, and relational: a mode of re-imagining reproductive justice beyond the confines of state-sanctioned care. By reframing reproductive health through the lens of radical care, voetvroue reclaim space, knowledge, and autonomy for Black birthing women in the face of ongoing racial-capitalist violence. In doing so, they revalorise locale-specific modes of knowledge and technologies and prioritise holistic approaches to birthing care.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/fgwh.2025.1531915","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,26]],"date-time":"2025-08-26T05:28:54Z","timestamp":1756186134000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Radical care: voetvroue and the reclamation of pleasure in reproductive health"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"6","author":[{"given":"Tamia Bianca","family":"Botes","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,26]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"271","DOI":"10.1017\/S0021853798007191","article-title":"Midwives and medical men in the cape colony before 1860","volume":"39","author":"Deacon","year":"1998","journal-title":"J Afr Hist"},{"key":"B2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"43","DOI":"10.2307\/j.ctt1pwt69x.7","article-title":"Black women\u2019s experience in slavery and medicine","volume-title":"Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology","author":"Owens","year":"2017"},{"key":"B3","volume-title":"Obstetric Violence in South Africa","author":"Chadwick","year":"2017"},{"key":"B4","first-page":"53","article-title":"Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power","volume-title":"Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches","author":"Lorde","year":"1984"},{"key":"B5","volume-title":"Rape: A South African Nightmare","author":"Gqola","year":"2015"},{"key":"B6","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"330","DOI":"10.2307\/27919104","article-title":"Downplaying difference: historical accounts of African American midwives and contemporary struggles for midwifery","volume":"36","author":"Craven","year":"2010","journal-title":"Fem Stud"},{"key":"B7","first-page":"326","article-title":"Health centre practice, promotive health services and the development of the health centres scheme","volume":"20","author":"Gale","year":"1920","journal-title":"S Afr Med J"},{"key":"B8","first-page":"270","article-title":"The reduction of maternal mortality and morbidity in its clinical aspect","volume":"275","author":"McGibbons","year":"1927","journal-title":"J Med Assoc S Afr"},{"key":"B9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.4159\/9780674037205","volume-title":"African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory","author":"Fraser","year":"1998"},{"key":"B10","first-page":"1","article-title":"Physicians and granny midwives in South Carolina","volume-title":"Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth","author":"Bonaparte","year":"2015"},{"key":"B11","article-title":"Ancestors South Africa","year":"2014"},{"key":"B12","volume-title":"The History of the Development of Nursing in South Africa, 1652\u20131960","author":"Searle","year":"1965"},{"key":"B13","volume-title":"Reproductive Labours: The Politics of Women\u2019s Health in South Africa, 1900 to 1960","author":"Burns","year":"1995"},{"key":"B14","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"3","DOI":"10.1017\/S0021853700027328","article-title":"The sanitation syndrome: bubonic plague and urban native policy in the cape colony, 1900\u20131909","volume":"18","author":"Swanson","year":"1997","journal-title":"J Afr Hist"},{"key":"B15","first-page":"255","article-title":"Modern advances in public health administration in urban native areas","volume":"7","author":"Milne","year":"1933","journal-title":"S Afr Med J"},{"key":"B16","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"688","DOI":"10.10520\/AJA20785135_15402","article-title":"Diamond jubilee medicine: the medical world of 1897 and 1898 seen in the pages of the South African medical journal","volume":"56","author":"Lucas","year":"1979","journal-title":"S Afr Med J"},{"key":"B17","volume-title":"Where Have the Midwives Gone? 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