Putting the Desert in the Center - Community Focused, BIPOC Birth Centers are the answer

Friday keynote

DATE: Friday, October 13th
TIME: 9:00 am - 10:00 am
FACULTY: Jeanine Valrie Logan, CNM, MSN, MPH

Where people are left to traverse the barren (eco)systems that continue to feed the devastating Maternal and Child Health for Black women in the US, many communities are turning inward to center community and healing within a larger Birth Justice framework to (re)discover a desert biome resilient and sustaining through community care. With Birth Justice as one of the foundational frameworks for many BIPOC-owned and led birth centers, specifically Chicago South Side Birth Center, we believe birth justice in praxis involves the centering of Black birthing people, Black experiences, and Black healing practices. We believe Black people have the solutions and technology to create our own liberation-specifically our freedom and autonomy regarding birth, parenting, and healing. In the development of more community-focused, BIPOC-led birth centers, it is understood that birth justice is part of a larger movement for racial, healing, and social justice. This lecture will examine the foundational frameworks of birth justice as well as examine how "liberatory tools" act as the emergent resistance to systemic and racialized obstetric trauma, to increase safe access to healthcare including midwifery care, trans health care, and abortion care.

Faculty

Jeanine Valrie Logan, CNM, MSN, MPH
Jeanine (she/her/goddess) is a midwife, herbalist, and culture bearer. She is a birth justice activist and the co-editor of the book Free to Breastfeed: Voices of Black Mothers. Jeanine works collectively with other birth workers of color and allies to address birth inequity--including the writing and passing of HB738 which expanded birth centers in the state of Illinois. She is now developing Chicago South Side Birth Center, a nonprofit, Black midwife-led, culturally congruent, community-focused birth center to be located on Chicago’s south side. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Fisk University and completed her nurse-midwifery education at Frontier Nursing University. Jeanine is a wife and mama to three awesome Empresses, 2 of which were born at home and 1 at a birth center. Jeanine spends her extra time with family, building bonfires, creating art, making herbal medicines, reading, gardening, and breathing under her favorite cedar tree.

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