Black Women Birthing Justice will have an essay featured in the forthcoming book Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change! This powerful anthology explores what happens when communities reject knowledge elites, and take control of the research process for ourselves. BWBJ's collaborative essay is titled By Us Not For Us and shares our experiences gathering 100 women's childbirth stories. Along the way, we became (co)researchers and were transformed in unexpected ways!

Did you know that…

• Young women, ages 12-19 are 2 times as likely to die during childbirth than women over age 20?

• Black adolescents are 2-3 times more likely to become pregnant than other races?

I’m an AMA mom. You know; an Advanced Maternal Age mom. I didn’t think that I was advanced in age when I got pregnant and I didn’t expect to be treated like a high risk case. In fact, I felt quite youthful, healthy and well prepared for pregnancy. That changed days after the unforgettable call from my infertility doctor when I heard those yearned for words: You’re pregnant! From my first prenatal visit, my confidence in my ability to carry and birth my baby, and my judgment in becoming pregnant as a forty-one year old woman, were questioned. Rather than a natural experience to be enjoyed and savored, my pregnancy was stressful, exhausting and at times terrifying as a result of medical interventions that I now know to have been unnecessary. I became just another high-risk statistic: a double jeopardy pregnancy–“black and AMA.”

Rethinking Black History Month: Black Women's Lives Matter Every Day

This year, I stopped celebrating Black History Month. The celebration was established by trailblazing African American historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson in order to bring attention to the contributions of African Americans to U.S. society, but in my opinion, it has become just another tool of white supremacy to placate progressive whites and people of color by acting as if Blackness matters to this country. This feigning of interest and concern has always been present in the collective consciousness, but as I sit and write this, it is visible in catastrophic ways. We are dying. We are being disenfranchised, diseased and murdered on so many levels. The violence is only silent as far as mainstream media is concern, but the screams do not escape my ears. My work with birthing women makes it impossible to ignore.

This March, we celebrate Women's History Month by acknowledging the struggles

and triumphs of black women who are making history!

Reproductive Justice in Ethiopia: Notes from a Diasporic Daughter

Giving birth is one of the most beautiful, defining moments in the lives of many women. Unfortunately in many developing nations the news of becoming pregnant can be daunting, due to injuries a woman may sustain while birthing her child. The word obstetric fistula is probably foreign to many, especially those individuals who live in industrialized nations. A fistula, otherwise known as vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), occurs when labor is prolonged and a hole is created between the birthing canal and one or more of a woman’s internal organs. Obstetric fistula has a serious negative impact on not only the physical bodies of women, but their mental, and social wellbeing, since it can result in constant leaking of urine as well as social ostracism.

Alyne’s Death and Transnational Solidarity

to End Maternal Death in the African Diaspora

In August 2011, the U.N. Committee for the Convention to Prevent All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) found that the Brazilian State had violated the reproductive health rights of Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira, a 28-year-old Afro-Brazilian woman who died a preventable maternal death. The Committee’s decision followed an eight-year legal battle by the U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of Alyne’s mother and daughter, who were left without financial support after her death. Alyne died on November 11, 2002, due to complications and medical neglect following a stillbirth that was inadequately treated at a health center. She lived in the Baixada Fluminense, an area of the greater metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, that has high rates of poverty and a predominantly Afro-Brazilian population.

My awakening to birth injustice began thousands of miles away from my hood of Baltimore City where we see some of the poorest birth outcomes in America. It happened in Ghana, West Africa.

I moved to Ghana in 1999 after working for years as a midwifery apprentice. I felt a strong desire to learn traditional childbirth rituals and customs from African midwives. After a year in the bush, I suddenly became severely ill. My friends took me into town to the military hospital, considered Ghana’s best medical facility. I had to pay the equivalent of $5 US to enter the hospital. As I waited to be seen, I witnessed a woman in labor being turned away because she didn’t have the entrance fee. She begged and begged but the soldier would not receive her. I wanted to help desperately but I barely had the energy to breathe.

A Midwife’s Perspective

For over twenty years, I have worked with the Harlem Birth Action Committee to activate, agitate and educate women and their families about the over-medicalization of childbirth. Last year, I took a sabbatical and was honored to have the opportunity to accept a three-month nurse-midwifery fellowship in Somaliland, East Africa.

I became a first time mother at the age of 29 and prior to that my hubby and I were very excited to start our family. As starry eyed beginners we started reading every parenting and childbirth book we could get our hands on, and as our due date rolled closer, we took every childbirth and lactation class we could take. We were going to be winners at childrearing!