Charity was 28 weeks pregnant and working as a public safety dispatcher in Birmingham, Alabama, when all of a sudden, something didn’t feel right. She sought out medical care and was given an IV drip and sent home. But still, she knew something was wrong.
Because she worked closely with first responders, she asked them to take a look when she was 34 weeks. They found discolored urine and dangerously high blood pressure – symptoms the hospital had missed. She would have to deliver her son immediately, and very early.
After a traumatic birth, Charity’s son was put in the NICU — far from her hospital room. Unable to visit independently because she was a fall risk, she and her partner worked to deliver pumped breast milk. One day, he walked into the NICU with a bottle, only to find nurses feeding her baby formula. Her milk had never been given to her newborn — replaced against her wishes.
Charity was changed forever after her experience – she felt dismissed, ignored, and undercut, and she couldn’t help but feel like it had to do with the fact that she was a Black woman seeking care in a system that wasn’t built for her. She didn’t want any woman to ever feel the way she had. So she turned her anguish into action and got to work becoming a doula, then a midwife, then an advocate – eventually co-writing the bill that would officially decriminalize midwifery in Alabama and open doors for all birthing people in the state.
What Charity experienced is called birth trauma – a physically or emotionally distressing experience that happens during one of the most vulnerable and, for some women, dangerous times of their life. Here in the United States, birth trauma is common – so common that we have a national week dedicated to it: Birth Trauma Awareness Week (BTAW).
For the past two years, Jennifer has talked with women nationwide not just about the trauma they’ve survived, but about the future they want to build. Black women, brown women, poor women — all naming what’s broken in our maternal health system and what it would actually take to fix it. These are the changemakers — ordinary people doing extraordinary work in their communities — people like Charity. Earlier this month, we brought birth workers together in Baltimore to tell their stories and put their solutions on the table. Across the South, we’re stitching together a network of midwives and doulas who refuse to accept our maternal mortality crisis as status quo.
Their vision shaped the Powering Health Justice Blueprint — a guide created by organizers, grassroots groups, and health workers that names the problems baked into our health system and lays out the community-led solutions it will take to fix it.
At the root of it all is racism in the delivery room. Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related complications at roughly three times the rate of white women — a gap that has barely budged in a generation, and one that researchers estimate is preventable in 80% of cases. It is unacceptable that in a country this well-resourced, Black and brown women are dying and being traumatized when we have the solutions to solve this crisis.
Solutions like expanded access to doulas and midwives who bring cultural competence to birth; better prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care in rural areas and care deserts; anti-bias training with real accountability when discrimination causes harm; and the basic guarantees everyone deserves — affordable healthcare, nutritious food, clean environments, and paid leave. Our maternal health crisis is not a medical mystery — it’s a policy choice.
In a political climate pushing women to have more babies while offering insulting substitutes for actual care, no amount of discounted fertility drugs, investment accounts, or food pyramid posters can undo the racism and sexism etched into our system — a legacy built on experimenting on Black women without anesthesia and dismissing their pain, one that still shapes how Black women are treated today. No woman should have to fear for her life or her baby’s life just because she’s Black.
Our maternal health crisis is a symptom of a deeper sickness in our healthcare system. The cure isn’t in some lab, think tank, or politician’s mind — it lives in our communities. It lives among the women who have lived through birth and know what they need better than anyone, and among the midwives, doulas, and advocates, many of them Black and brown, already shepherding families and fighting to build something better.
With their work and the movement to transform our health system underway, maybe one day, we won’t need a Birth Trauma Awareness Week at all.
By: Jennifer Wells, Director of Care at Community Change and Charity Howard, Founder of Bumble + Bee Midwifery