Blog

El Jardín Birth and Family began the Birth in Pieces project in 2015. A labor of love, this project spanned multiple years and took various twists and turns as we interviewed more and more women. Patterns emerged. We realized that these individual narratives, together, painted a picture of modern birth culture. What's wrong with birth in the USA? It's time to ask mothers. The film is the outcome of their work interviewing mothers and their partners talking about their experiences with birth.

By Rebecca Gale, Working Mother, March 23, 2021 Charnae Easton was forced to breast-pump in front of a window. So she sued—and won. Here, she shares her story for the first time. Charnae Easton knew she wanted to breastfeed her daughter. Even when she was pregnant, she told her supervisors at the Richmond, California post office where she worked as a mail carrier that she would need a place to pump milk when she returned from leave. She’d even planned to work up until she gave birth,...

Willis & Friends is a monthly webseries on early relational health. About this event The COVID pandemic has highlighted ongoing and long-standing racial inequities in maternal and child health care and financing, as well as the lack of systematic and widespread approaches for the prevention and promotion efforts in ensuring the future wellbeing of U.S. children and youth. Our U.S. populations fare substantially less well than those in other advanced countries in maternal, infant and...

This article was initially published in RACmonitor and appears with the publisher’s permission The country’s smallest hospitals continue to be in peril, as are the patients who rely on them. This issue continues to be the reality for rural health with major challenges for the patients and providers in those regions. 7.4% of babies born in the US are birthed at hospitals handling 10 to 500 births a year, or “low-volume” hospitals. In the context of our industry’s fiscal focus, that number...

Please join us for a new series entitled: Trauma-Informed Criminal Justice. This monthly virtual Zoom series will feature conversations facilitated by Porter Jennings-McGarity, PACEs Connection’s criminal justice consultant, with special guests to discuss the need for trauma-informed criminal justice system reform. Using a PACEs-science lens, this series will examine the relationship between trauma and the criminal justice system, what needs changing, and strategies being used in this area...

By Darby Saxbe and Sofia Cardenas, The New York Times, November 8, 2021 After President Biden left paid family leave out of his Build Back Better Act last month, a familiar marshaling of forces took place. Women’s groups and female leaders protested. Senator Patty Murray of Washington said Democrats should not “tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave.” Democratic leaders, well aware that women are the base of the party, have restored four weeks of family leave, at...

Bay Area nonprofit, Supporting Mamas, is proud to co-host the premiere of From the Ashes , a personal film from Theresa Fortune about her own journey with postpartum depression. The premiere will feature a panel of mental health experts exploring the inequities of maternal mental healthcare faced by women of color. From the Ashes is a multidisciplinary narrative of a black woman’s journey through postpartum depression and towards spiritual rebirth. Through the use of photography, video...

Supporting Mamas presents FROM THE ASHES, A short documentary Film by filmmaker, Theresa Fortune on November 6, 2021 6pm pacific time. The official virtual premiere of From the Ashes , a multidisciplinary narrative of a Black woman’s journey through postpartum depression and towards spiritual rebirth, will take place on Saturday November 6 at 6pm. Supporting Mamas is incredibly proud to co-host this free screening, which will feature a panel of mental health experts exploring the inequities...

BOISE, Idaho — There is a new high school in Boise for pregnant and parenting teenagers. Cardinal Academy Public Charter School is located on the Salvation Army's recently completed Booth Campus on Emerald Avenue. Cardinal Academy is a free public charter school that offers these students in 9th-12th grade, ages 14-21, the opportunity to get their education and get the support they need to parent while they receive their diploma. "Cardinal is such an amazing resource because they have...

By 1,000 Days, October 2021 In this update to our 2019 report, The First 1,000 Days: The Case for Paid Leave in America , we present the latest research and data from the last two years on the opportunity to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in maternal and child health through the passage of a universal, comprehensive paid family and medical leave policy in the United States. [ Please click here to access the report .]

By Lizzie Tribone, Talk Poverty, October 5, 2021 When Jennifer Brown left Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee on a work-release program, it had been six-and-a-half months since she had seen her son, Elijah. The last time they’d been together was when she gave birth to him, under the watch of two prison guards, in a hospital near the prison. Brown had forty-eight hours with her newborn before she had to hand him over to a family chosen by Together for Good, a religious nonprofit that...

By Shameka Poetry Thomas, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, October 5, 2021 My grandmother was a traditional healer and a medicine-woman in Georgia’s rural South. Although I grew up in Miami’s Opa-Locka (a small urban neighborhood tucked between Miami-Gardens and the cusp of Hialeah / Little Havana), I spent most summers near middle Georgia’s farmland, listening to my grandmother. I observed how grandmother, who did not have a Ph.D., gathered Black women in...