It’s Black Maternal Health Week. Here’s everything you should know to protect yourself and those you love.
Black maternal health in the U.S. is still in crisis. With Black women three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, the birthing experience can feel less like a sacred rite of passage and more like a battleground. And for many, the persistent headlines of medical neglect, traumatic births, and systemic failures have become a deterrent to parenthood itself.
But amidst this painful reality, a story rooted in joy, agency, and radical self-determination is emerging. Across the country, Black women and birthing people are reclaiming what it means to give birth on their own terms. And through informed choices, holistic care, community-rooted support systems, and self-trust, they’re not just surviving pregnancy, but they’re transforming it into what it was meant to be for us all along.
When wellness creator Ragin Al-Nahdy, aka West Indie Ray, began planning for her first child, she felt grounded in one clear intention: “I wanted my son’s entrance into the world to be as peaceful as possible,” she says. Although her original plan was to have a home birth, she ultimately gave birth at a birth center—an experience that still felt deeply aligned with her values. “There’s so much information about the way that Black people are treated in medical settings, where our feelings and instincts are neglected,” she continues.
For Al-Nahdy, choosing care outside of the hospital was also a way to avoid the extremes so many Black birthing people face—being ignored altogether or treated like a crisis before their needs are even heard. “[Giving birth is] literally the most natural thing I’ve ever done,” she reflects, and she wanted care that honored that.
That balance is what so many Black birthing people are seeking: care that is competent and affirming, spiritual and informed. But reaching that balance often means confronting deeply entrenched systemic barriers, especially in hospital settings.
Celebrity chef and food justice advocate Sophia Roe, who is currently expecting her first child (she found out on her birthday, which was also election day), described her own shock at how difficult it was to find consistent prenatal care in New York City. “I must have [gotten]—no joke, this is not hyperbole, this is not an exaggeration—40 plus rejection emails from midwives,” she says. Some were already booked for July births, some were too overloaded, while some simply sent a “nevermind” email and disappeared after one meeting. “I didn’t actually secure a midwife until I was 16, almost 17 weeks pregnant…I was sobbing, desperate.”
Even after finding a trusted provider, Roe says her concerns about maternal health risks were often brushed aside. She brought up well-documented disparities—like the increased likelihood of Black women developing preeclampsia, fibroids, or experiencing complications after birth—only to be met with skepticism and dismissive questions. At one point, a doctor questioned the validity of her statistics and asked how many deaths had occurred “out of how many births,” a response that left Roe stunned. For her, it wasn’t about how frequent the outcomes were—it was the fact that they were happening at all.
That dissonance between what Black birthing people know to be true and how they’re treated in clinical spaces is part of what birth justice advocates like Latham Thomas have spent decades working to shift. The founder of Mama Glow and a master birth doula, Thomas says the foundation of reclaiming birth begins with understanding the context.
“There was a time historically where our bodies literally produced the wealth of this nation…It’s a fairly new thing for us to have bodily autonomy as Black women,” she explains. And because the statistics around Black maternal mortality haven’t improved since the Civil War, she stresses the importance of understanding the legacy we’re up against. In fact, although infant death rates overall have plummeted since the 19th century, research shows that the racial disparity between Black and white infant mortality is actually greater today than it was under antebellum slavery—a sobering reminder that history is embedded in the systems we’re still navigating.
Part of Thomas’s mission is preserving the sacred nature of birth, something she experienced firsthand during the birth of her son Fulano. “My son was born on a full moon and a double rainbow,” she recalls. She labored at a birth center—first in water and then eventually in a bed—surrounded by loved ones and watched over by ancestors, describing a literal out-of-body experience where she saw her birth from above. The experience she described was euphoric, healing, and powerful. And 20 minutes after he was born, she knew she had to protect that kind of experience for other Black women. “That’s when I knew that at some point this work would be woven into my life,” she recalls. “I had no idea at the time what that would look like, but that was really sort of the seed that was planted that would become Mama Glow.”
That legacy is compounded for queer and trans parents, who often navigate even more layers of invisibility. For award-winning sexuality educator and activist Ericka Hart, the decision to work with a Black, queer midwife for their pregnancy was deeply intentional. But after developing preeclampsia, they were forced to give birth in a hospital—and the contrast was stark.
One doctor told Hart, “You’re a big girl.” Another scrolled Instagram while holding Hart during the epidural. And during the C-section, they were discussing weekend plans. “You are just another dollar sign to them,” Hart says.
Even with the challenges some faced, all of the parents featured in this story point to the ways they were held—by midwives, doulas, community, and chosen family. In Hart’s case, that person was their midwife, Racha Tahani Lawler Queen. She helped Hart walk again. She let Hart cry. She stayed with Hart and their partner for a week and a half and coordinated meals and diapers. “Racha saved my life,” Hart says. “She was our knight in shining armor. She asked questions we didn’t have the answers to.”
Roe has found ways to protect her joy and emotional well-being as her pregnancy progresses, especially amidst the heavy political atmosphere. “Everything I’m doing right now is cool down,” she says. That looks like less news. More slowness. More sun. Less chaos. Because she’s growing a life. “Right now, my job is to save my baby.”
That idea of protecting joy is echoed by all four parents. For Al-Nahdy, who lost her mother before becoming a mom herself, joy has been both healing and grounding. Though there’s grief in not being able to ask her mother the questions she once thought she had covered, she finds comfort in the lessons her mother left behind—and in the support of her sister, grandmother, and aunties who continue to hold her through the transition.
These days, joy looks like witnessing her baby discover the world, honoring her own needs, and staying present. She prioritizes nourishing her body and mind, carving out space to reconnect with the parts of herself beyond motherhood. “It’s been really important for me to reintroduce freedom into my life as it becomes available to me, so every chance I get, whether it looks like me taking time to myself while my husband has the baby or taking the baby along with me to get out of the house, I’m doing it.”
For Hart, joy has always been central to queer and trans parenting. “White supremacist capitalist patriarchy—thank you, bell hooks—wants us to be scared. They want you to be afraid. They don’t want you to think that you can create and cultivate life,” says Hart. But we can. And when we do, we honor the families we’ve created, not just the ones we were born into, which is radical.
Thomas agrees that joy isn’t rare—it’s possible. However, it requires removing the barriers that force Black women to fight for what should already be theirs. “We need to stop creating the actual barriers to Black women being able to just birth,” she says. “To stop requiring them to advocate, to fight for their safety and dignity, to constantly be in dialogue with their providers just to be heard.”
If those barriers were gone, she adds, the experience of birth could be what it was always meant to be: powerful, sacred, and transformative. “There is special medicine in birth that’s available to us,” she says. “And we need to take that with us. What we’re being severed from—I don’t even know how to quantify it. But it’s there. It’s for you. It’s your message. It’s your experience.”
As this country continues to reckon with maternal disparities, the question remains: What would it mean to give birth without fear? What would it mean to not just survive, but to feel held, honored, and whole?
As Roe expresses, we deserve to feel safe. We deserve not to have to fight. “That softness that we hear about, that openness that is so necessary for birth, we deserve that,” she says. And that’s the vision these storytellers are modeling. From home births to birth centers, spiritual rituals to structural advocacy, their choices aren’t just personal, but collective. They signal a movement toward not just changing outcomes, but transforming the experience itself.
Reclaiming birth doesn’t mean ignoring the crisis. It means meeting it with clarity, care, and community. And through radical self-trust, culturally rooted support, and the power of storytelling, Black birthing people are creating a new legacy where joy, safety, and sovereignty are no longer revolutionary. They’re standard.
Steph R. Long is a Chopra-certified Ayurvedic health educator, meditation instructor, and well-being coach. She’s also the founder of holistic wellness and coaching practice SRL Well-Being and the former Deputy Director of Enterprise for Refinery29 Unbothered, where she oversaw health, wellness, and spirituality content. For more wellness insights, follow her on Instagram and YouTube, and subscribe to her podcast.
