Hippie Moms, Homebirths, and Antivax: Birth, Life, and Medical Mistrust in the Northern San Francisco Bay Area

In this dissertation, I use a critical anthropological lens to understand mistrust of mainstream medicine, using alternative birth care (such as homebirth, or unattended birth) as an analytic entry point. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018, 2021, and 2022-2023, I discuss the case of a group of self-described Hippie Moms who seek out non-mainstream forms of birth care in the context of rejecting biomedicine more broadly, and exhibiting preferences for alternative care, such as midwife-attended homebirth, homeopathy and naturopathy, and vaccine refusal and delay (or antivax beliefs). This work explains both the emic logic which contributes to how the group makes decisions and views the world, as well as uncovering community trauma as a causal pathway for individuals to join communities which reject mainstream forms of knowledge and expertise. Paradoxically, while exhibiting pronounced medical mistrust in their beliefs and behaviors, the Hippie Moms represent a socially powerful community which statistically tends to be less at-risk in medical care, even though many women I spoke to told me about traumatic experiences they had endured within mainstream care. Concordant with regional trends showing increased gentrification in the region, the Hippie Moms tend to be affluent, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, and highly educated. Research has shown that people who tend to suffer worse health outcomes within the auspices of mainstream medical practice, particularly during childbirth, tend to come from marginalized groups such as communities of color. Medical mistrust stemming from socially powerful groups is a growing global phenomenon. Research has shown that anti-biomedical beliefs and rhetoric are increasingly associated with groups that are socially, economically, and politically quite powerful—communities that tend towards whiteness and affluence. This observation is counterintuitive, since socially powerful communities are predominantly not the populations that tend to be medically marginalized, rather quite the opposite; we tend to see adverse health outcomes, and worse treatment during medical care, disproportionately taking place among otherwise-marginalized people, such as communities of color. This trend follows patterns in the increases of mistrust of mainstream medical and scientific knowledge more broadly. While we might intuitively understand why a community that had been historically brutalized by biomedical and scientific institutions might be mistrustful of biomedical care, what might motivate this same form of distrust among a community without such a history? What might it mean for a socially powerful community to refuse or even reject mainstream knowledges, practices, and institutions? Why might such a community reject biomedical care, and what does that mean about biomedical practice in the U.S.? And why might we be seeing parallel rejections of medical and scientific knowledge from white communities at both the extremely conservative and progressive edges of the US political spectrum? This is the central paradox that this dissertation addresses.