March Like a Mother for Black Lives, June 27, 2020 (transcript)

Nashira Baril (with her daughter) speaking at March Like a Mother for Black Lives Rally, June 27, 2020

Photo by Tess Sheflan

Watch the video of Nashira following our new board member Dr. Ndidi Amutah-Onukagha speaking about the Black maternal health crisis and making a call to action for academic institutions to shift power and resources to community here.

I have been feeling a lot of dissonance lately: dissonance is defined as the tension between disharmonious events. 

A few days after George Floyd’s murder I was sitting at my parent’s house in Rhode Island, in our COVID pod, working on the deck, while within earshot, my two and a half year old was holding court at the compost, tending to the red wiggler worms, directing them to the avocado pit and away from a random clam shell. A few feet away on the other side, was my husband, inside working.  In between each work call he had, he'd made calls to his friends, each one of them would start like this “hey Black man, how you living right?” And what followed was a painful conversation to bear witness to.  He spent much of the time of two weeks we were there inside the house because of the increased police presence with the reopening of RI beaches. 

I was – and I am still experiencing dissonance. As the mother of two Black babies, 7 and 2.5, I’m witnessing them love the freedom of this covid summer - as strange as that sounds. While we haven’t left our postage stamp of a backyard in Mattapan, there’s no camp, no school, no daycare and nowhere to be. And they are experiencing joy in the sprinkler and in the garden. While my heart and the world weeps and rages around us. 

Black grief. Black joy. Dissonance. 

In early April, Arundhati Roy, Indian author and political activist wrote a piece called “the pandemic is a portal.” In it she offered up that disasters and crises, like pandemics, are “pattern interrupters”. That this pandemic is offering us a chance to break out of the trance of dominant consciousness.  

About the global longing for a return to normal, she wrote “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

The pandemic is a portal. The call to lean into this moment - thick with pandemic and police and vigilante violence - has resonated with me in recent months. 

I am working to open a birth center poised to be the first freestanding birth center in Boston. 

And on that first Saturday in March, when COVID hit my neighborhood and we started sheltering in place, I got the first of what would be two dozen similar inquiries: the voice on the other end of the line or through the text is super pregnant and asking “Is your birth center open?” And to every inquiry in the last three months, my answer has been no. Now, if I had a philanthropic commitment for every time I have been asked that, we’d be much closer to opening. 

But it’s not only in COVID that I’ve received these calls. 

We’ve long known that Boston’s robust healthcare landscape would be significantly improved by the integration of a freestanding birth center. 

A volunteer project for 5yrs already, I jump for as many grant opportunities as I can. This week I was responding to an RFP, and I saw this question “What are we doing differently as a result of the community response to George Floyd’s murder?” I’ll pause here for us all to take that in. So, for $5,000 I painstakingly explained how we are doing nothing different except doing the labor we always do to center Blackness, while grieving. 

I told them how the crisis of the current moment is familiar to us as people who live and organize under the constant threat of conditions created by white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Boston’s first and only birth center is being built by Black mothers who face increased risk of death and infant mortality in pregnancy and childbirth, and we are working, parenting, and building a healthcare start up in the midst of a global pandemic, while we witness rampant and preventable racial inequity in COVID-19, police violence, and assaults by the media. I told them that what we are doing differently is that we are focusing on healing our hearts and staying radicalized while holding the rage and sadness in our homes and in our community. We stand committed to organizing to actively shift the distribution of power and resources to ensure people of color and other structurally marginalized communities have access to safe, out of hospital birth.

My Sister, Dr. Ndidi spoke no word of a lie. These equities are not natural. There’s nothing inherently higher risk about being pregnant while Black other than living in a society that is structured on a racial hierarchy with us at the bottom. But there’s another important piece to note which is that when we say “4x more likely” or “200% more often” it’s always relative to the white rate. And that is a big illusion that we should aim to close the gap and align Black birth outcomes with those of white folks. What we learned in surveying for the birth center was that white cis women with a graduate degree or higher and who earn $200,000 a year in the greater Boston area, they reported horrible experiences in their pregnancy and childbirth. They felt disrespect. One person reported that the nurses made fun of her vocalizations while she was in labor. Another said she felt like she was birthing in a machine. 

Let us not be fooled, the maternal health system is not working well for anyone. We have to get clear about this. When we zoom out and look at measures of infant mortality or life expectancy across the 37 OECD or economically developed countries, the US has terrible outcomes. What’s more – if we looked at the data of white population of the US as if it were its own country, it would still fare in the bottom in infant mortality when compared to other countries, just a hair better than the US as a whole. What a distraction to try to “close the gap” and level Black outcomes to that of our white counterparts. 

Let me pause and make a call to the white folks in community with us today – please receive the call to justice from a place of being clear about your own skin in the game. Do not fight racism because it’s bad for Black people. In the same way we do not want men to fight patriarchy because they feel bad for women. You’ll tire and give it up tomorrow if you are doing it from a place of service and not solidarity. Yes, across all systems, outcomes are better for white people, but your freedom is an illusion. Dissonance! 

So, my two babies were born at home, into the loving hands of my mother and highly trained midwives. Hours after my son's birth we were on the back deck, enjoying an unusually warm October day enjoying food and drink. I was encircled by midwives who trusted me and my body and who were committed to bearing witness to my power, first and foremost. 

And I hold this experience with dissonance as I know countless stories of trauma to also be true. 

So along with my elder midwives, I feel called to be part of a community expanding birth options here in Boston because dissonance is exhausting. Reconciling disharmonious events is exhausting. 

What does a new world look like when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth? Let’s imagine, or reimagine really, because all of our ancestors knew this wisdom before we pathologized physiologic birth. 

Join me – close your eyes if you want, put a hand on your heart or your womb if you want, raise a fist if you want, feel the support of Mother Earth under your feet, take a deep breath and imagine with me the energy of our first birth center: a beautiful spa-like space, one that could rival any Newbury street spa with fine linens, plush robes, and fruit infused water and teas. It is lovingly staffed by midwives, providing full spectrum care during the throughout pregnancy, labor, birth, and the postpartum period. There’s wrap-around care from mental health providers, chiropractic, reiki, yoga, massage, an apothecary with sacred herbs. I see a welcoming, joyful place to relax and to connect, a space to be seen and to see each other. I feel an organization operationalizing equity in everything from who holds the contracts, to how the organization is governed, to who entrusts us with their care during the most powerful transformational time of pregnancy and birth. 

There is a sense of belonging. 

When I listen closely, I can hear children asking questions about bellies and boobies, answered lovingly by caring adults aware of their simultaneous transformation to big sibling and their expanding worldview. There is a calmness in the space that comes with people experiencing healthcare where our full selves – our bodies, our traumas, our identities, and our relationships – are honored and belong. 

It is led by people of color, and because it is so, everything from policy, to space, to programming has been designed with an eye to justice and liberation and an eye to checking embedded white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. 

When I close my eyes, I feel Neighborhood BirthCenter as a place where everyone gets free. 

There have been powerful studies to demonstrate the safety, cost savings, outcomes, and intergenerational healing made possible by investing in community birth centers. 

Yet, in a city as rich in health care resources and endowed wealth as Boston, Black, queer, trans, and disabled volunteers are rubbing two pennies together to open our first birth center. Dissonance. 

The question is, what’s getting in the way?

I believe we have to reconcile the dissonance between our espoused beliefs in justice and equity and our relative inaction. The threat of returning to normality. The desire to return to normalcy. 

Arundhati Roy also wrote once  “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” 

When I listen to the new world breathing, I tune into a belief in abundance, and I know, and when I look at you, I know, that there is the wisdom and will to grow and leverage full spectrum capital for this birth enter and very birth center around the country that is being asked in this moment “Are you open? We need you.”