America Needs Black Midwives
On the sweet, sacred cycle of birth and death
May 8th is the most significant day of my life.
May 8, 1976, my parents, William and Hattie Aquilla Spann-Goode, married.
May 8, 1981, I, Keisha L. Goode, their only child, was born.
May 8, 2016 was William and Hattie’s 40th wedding anniversary and Keisha’s 35th birthday. On this same day, Hattie Aquilla (nicknamed Hattie ‘Killa for her ferocity) died at the age of 76. It was also Mother’s Day.
This essay is about my walk with grief, the midwives who carried me along the way, and why our country — in the thick of the grief and trauma wrought by police brutality and the Covid-19 pandemic — needs midwives. I am not a midwife, but I am a sociologist and a midwifery, especially Black midwifery, enthusiast. From 2011 to 2013, I conducted the first study of contemporary Black midwives in the United States: Birthing, Blackness and the Body: Black Midwives and Experiential Continuities of Institutional Racism. Using the evidence-based, relationship-centered Midwives Model of Care, where there are midwives, there are good births — both in the childbearing process and in the outcomes. This is true for all women in all birth settings, but especially so for Black mothers and babies. In April of 2015, my work granted me the honor…
