Birth in Community

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Hello and welcome to “Birth in Community,” a podcast about the history of women supporting each other through pregnancy and using community to work against oppressive systems.  

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In today’s episode, we will be talking about the history of midwifery, from Byllye Avery to Birth Justice. From the beginning, Black women have been the core of the reproductive justice movement, and this includes the current Birth Justice movement. Birth Justice is a movement that works under the umbrella of repro. Repro pioneer Loretta Ross defines birth justice as “the right to give birth with whom, where, when, and how a person chooses”¹

Voices for Birth Justice is an organization working within this movement. Its goal is to provide women of color with the accessible services needed for a healthy and comfortable birth. This includes breastfeeding services, free childbirth classes, doulas, midwives, and a community of women who understand what it is like to be Black and pregnant in the USA. One of the doulas states that 

{Audio clip: “I am a doula. I support your choices, your labor, your body your partner. I hold your hand, your space, your privacy, your birth plan. I trust your instinct, your partner, your baby, and your process. I answer your questions, your texts, your calls with kindness”}² 

The Voices for Birth Justice website gives a history of the importance of birth justice in highlighting the comparative statistics of maternal and infant mortality among Black women and their white counterparts. 

Additionally, the website includes a section called the storyteller gallery in which the personal stories of the women involved in the organization are shared. 

They state that “OUR STORIES MATTER. We are advocates from different backgrounds and professions who are working to improve Black and Brown birth outcomes. We share our stories of action and change to connect more pregnant people to culturally relevant resources and support and inspire more people to join the movement.”³ 

The stories are divided up into the different roles the women play. One of the women, Julie Harris, is a birth justice advocate. In her story, she states that her hospital birth experience “shows me how much we don’t need to rely on a system that isn’t for us. It just emphasizes to me the need for care that reflects us, like with our Black and Brown doulas and our midwives – we can step away from hospital care. When it comes to being able to feel respected and heard and seen, and for me to receive the care that I feel that I need, without relying on people who don’t know me and who don’t seem like they care about me. That’s where I’m at.”⁴ 

Voices for Birth Justice sees the importance of community care and seeing yourself represented in your caregivers. They are working to undo the harmful and discriminatory experiences many Black women find in traditional medical environments. 

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While the birth justice movement is relatively new, it has precedent dating back to the 1970s 

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The 1970s was a time ripe with social change; this included the rise of Black feminist movements 

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The feminist movement of the 1970s focused on the right to bodily autonomy, specifically abortion. It was highly effective, ultimately succeeding with the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. However, this mainstream feminist movement overlooked the reproductive justice issues faced by non-white women. This sparked Black women to speak up about the specific issues faced by intersectionality and led them to organize in community. Within these communities, the conversations moved beyond just abortion rights and touched on every pillar of what we now know as reproductive justice 

Byllye Avery was and still is one of the most important activists in the fight for bodily autonomy. 

She entered into the world of activism through the National Women’s Health Network a non-profit that worked to give women more of a voice within the healthcare system. 

Through this work, Avery went on to work with many health centers. According to the book Undivided Rights, it was through this work that Avery noticed “that a discretionally high number of black women came to the center for abortions, but few black women participated in the OB/GYN care that the health centers offered. She realized that black women had too many other worries to make their own health a priority. She worked with center staff to establish a new model of health care and services based on black and poor women’s needs to provide an environment where women could feel comfortable and take control of their own health.”⁵ This idea was brought to fruition in 1978; here is a clip of Byllye Avery discussing the process of opening the center 

[Audio clip: “So we found this big two-story, turn-of-the-century house in northeast Gainesville that had been a Methodist parsonage, and it was absolutely perfect. It had a huge living-room area that we made into a library and that’s where we could teach our childbirth classes. It had beautiful rugs on the floor. We went around and begged things. We got things from antique stores. We asked people to lend us stuff out of their houses. And we had a playroom downstairs. It had a fully equipped kitchen, and upstairs we had two birthing suites, one with a big brass bed and the other with a four poster bed. And then the midwife had her quarters. We hired Nancy Redfern, who was a midwife who worked down in the southern part of the state, Fort Myers. We brought her up. She became our midwife. She was absolutely just gifted, very gifted, in the whole midwifery thing.” ]⁶

 This design of the center was highly intentional as it allowed the women to feel as though they were in a safe environment. This was heavily contrasted with the institutional and sometimes trauma inducing appearance of hospitals A pamphlet from the center highlighted family-centered care, in which “The emotional and social needs of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting are recognized as important aspects of the childbearing process. Women and their partners are encouraged to be active participants in their care and informed decision makers.” ⁷

Avery highlights this active participation in this next audio clip, in which she talks about the actual childbirth process 

[Audio Clip: “A lot of women had labors exactly like their mothers, so we would always ask them, Find out, what was your mother’s labor like? A lot of women couldn’t deliver in the bed. They needed to get on the floor. They just needed to have something firmer. So she’d put all the sheets and stuff on the floor, and the woman would sit on the floor, and the baby would come. Some women couldn’t deliver in the lithotomy position, that is, laying flat on their back with their legs open. Most of them delivered on their sides with their leg up on the midwife’s shoulder. That was a much more comfortable way to deliver.]⁸

This sense of authority and choice that the Birthing Center allowed is the goal of modern-day birth justice movements, giving women back the power to make their own decisions about their birth. Just as the Birthing Center in 1978 gave women this power, the birth justice movement works to make this power more widely available to women across the country

Some other organizations working for birth justice are SouthernBirthJustice, Black Women Birthing Justice, and ICTC. The community building and collective care done by these organizations are increasingly important as we enter into another term with Trump as the president. His medical appointments will only make Black women increasingly unsafe within the medical industry.  Additionally, the community built through these birth justice organizations gives women a better understanding of their bodies and allows them to be better advocates for themselves and their communities. 

Finally, I urge you to check out SisterSong’s birth justice care fund, in which they raise money to help Black women fund pregnancy expenses 

Thank you so much for listening to this episode, stay strong and stay in community.

1. Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (University of California Press, 2017) 261. ↩︎
2. Instagram Video posted by @voices4birthjustice on March 28, 2024 ↩︎
3. “Our Stories Matter,” Storyteller Gallery, Voices for Birth Justice, https://voicesforbirthjustice.org/storyteller-gallery/ ↩︎
4. “Julie Harris,” Storyteller Gallery, Voices for Birth Justice, https://voicesforbirthjustice.org/portfolio/julie-h/ ↩︎
5. Loretta Ross, etc. al, Undivided Rights (Haymarket Books, 2010) 72. ↩︎
6. Byllye Avery, “BYLLYE Y. AVERY,” interviewed by Loretta Ross, Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, July 2005. ↩︎
7. Birthplace pamphlet, 1978, Byllye Avery papers (SSC-MS-00652), box 3, Smith College Archives ↩︎
8. Byllye Avery, “BYLLYE Y. AVERY,” interviewed by Loretta Ross, Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, July 2005. ↩︎

https://www.sistersong.net/bjcarefund

https://southernbirthjustice.org/

https://www.blackwomenbirthingjustice.com/

Avery, Byllye. Byllye Avery papers (SSC-MS-00652). Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s 

History, Northampton, MA. 

Avery, Byllye. “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project.” Interveiwed by Loretta J. Ross. 

Sofia Smith Collection. July, 2005. 

Jones, Linda. 2021. Voices for Birth Justice. https://voicesforbirthjustice.org/birth-justice/

Lee, Lisa. 2023. “Overtown Birth Justice Mural.” Southern Birth Justice. 

https://southernbirthjustice.org/mural-1

Malik, Bryon. 2021. “Breezy Powell.” Voices for Birth Justice. 

Nayak, Anika. 2024. “The History That Explains Today’s Shortage of Black Midwives.” Time. https://time.com/6727306/black-midwife-shortage-history/.

Oregon Health & Science University. n.d. “A Brief History of Midwifery in America.” https://www.ohsu.edu/womens-health/brief-history-midwifery-america.

Ross, Loretta, and Rickie Solinger. 2017. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. N.p.: University of California Press.

Silliman, Jael M., Marlene G. Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. 2016. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Edited by Jael M. Silliman, Marlene G. Fried, and Loretta Ross. N.p.: Haymarket Books.

SisterSong. n.d. “SisterSong Care Fund.” SisterSong. https://www.sistersong.net/bjcarefund.

Terrell, Ellen. 2020. “Honoring African American Contributions in Medicine: Midwives.” Library of Congress Blogs. https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2020/06/honoring-african-american-contributions-in-medicine-midwives/.

Voices for Birth Justice. n.d. “Voices For Birth Justice.” Voices For Birth Justice. https://voicesforbirthjustice.org/.