Protecting Pregnant People with The Baobab Birth Collective

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Knowing what she knows now, Chauntel Norris looks back on her own birthing experience as traumatic. After attending a friend’s home birth and witnessing how the entire room centered around her and her needs, Chauntel suddenly felt cheated in her birthing experience.

Studies show that more people die during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S. than in any other similarly wealthy country in the world, with Black and Indigenous people disproportionately affected.

Despite research supporting the role that midwives and doulas can play in helping to reverse the devastating trend of rising maternal deaths, they are rarely covered by insurance, and states often don’t officially recognize them to attend births.

When Chauntel co-founded The Baobab Birth Collective, she made it her mission to provide the support and access to information that is so often lacking in maternal care in an effort to prevent people from fearing what should be an empowering experience.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

What the role of a doula is
The challenges surrounding hospital doula agreements
How Chauntel was introduced to the reproductive justice movement
What The Baobab Birth Collective is, who it serves, and how it’s furthering reproductive justice
Ways that you can help advance better maternal health outcomes and support doulas

More about Chauntel:

Chauntel Norris co-founded The Baobab Birth Collective and is co-director of the Alabama Prison Birth Project. She is a native of Birmingham, AL, and attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she earned her B.A. in African American Studies & her B.S. in Psychology. Chauntel is a DONA-trained birth & postpartum Doula, a Lamaze-certified childbirth educator, and a certified lactation counselor. She is an active member of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, a community transformer for Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere, and serves on the board of the Alabama Breastfeeding Committee.

HEALTH Program Description:

The Health Equity & Access Leadership Training Hub (hereinafter The HEALTH Program) is the newly established grant program of the NWHN. The HEALTH Program aims to shift paradigms and shape policies from grassroots-to-grasstops by helping build the capacity of organizations and bolstering their engagement in high-impact legislative advocacy efforts. The HEALTH Program’s main areas of focus include (1) addressing health inequities that disproportionately impact historically and systematically marginalized communities, (2) expanding healthcare access through legislative advocacy, and (3) improving health outcomes for women-in all their diversities-across the lifespan.

Sponsors:

Resources for Episode 018:

Learn more about The Baobab Birth Collective on their Facebook page
Follow The Baobab Birth Collective on Instagram: @baobabbirth
Get in touch with Chauntel via email: [email protected]
The Alabama Prison Birth Project provides one-on-one peer support to expectant mothers and birth-givers imprisoned in Alabama.
The film “Tutwiler” gives an insight into the lives of women who give birth while incarcerated at one of America’s most notorious prisons. We see their struggle to stay connected with their children on the outside and how the mothers turn to a group of doulas for support through pregnancy, labor, and separation from their newborns.

Some Terms and Linked Definitions

Doula
Reproductive Justice: The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent our children in safe and sustainable communities.