A Decade of Vision: Black Maternal Health and the Work Ahead — Tatyana Ali and Angela Aina in Conversation
Dear Reader,
Happy Black Maternal Health Week! Below is a Q and A that includes prose from a shero of mine. Co-founder of Black Mamas Matter Alliance, Angela Doyinsola Aina is a revolutionary. It's hard for me to quantify her impact for you, because her future visioning and organizational prowess have spun threads that will cover us far into the future. Instead of trying to calculate that, read her words. Herstory is being made now. She holds the vision.
Enjoy this blogpost. And take heart, everything we dream of is on the way.
Q. Ten years ago, your paths converged around a shared commitment to Black maternal health. Before we get into the work itself, can you each take a moment to share what you remember about how your partnership began?
Angela: For me, ten years ago feels like yesterday. What I remember most vividly is the sense of urgency and possibility that surrounded everything we were building in those early years. Tatyana came into this movement at a particularly meaningful moment. It was 2018, the year BMMA launched Black Maternal Health Week as a national campaign and boldly founded and implemented the Black Maternal Health Conference & Training Institute™ (BMHC). Tatyana agreed to be a guest speaker at our inaugural conference to share her birth story of navigating the healthcare system. What we didn’t know at the time was that she was pregnant with her second child, and she showed up anyway -- not as a celebrity lending her name to a cause, but as someone in the thick of it, personally, professionally, and spiritually.
What struck me most was that she was not just learning the language of reproductive justice and birth justice. She was living it, in real time, in her own body. She wrote about it. She named BMMA and this movement as central to her own healing and awakening. That is a rare and precious thing. And I believe that is the foundation on which we’ve been able to deepen our relationship.
Tatyana: I was a mother who needed help. I needed community in the worst way. I feel as though I sent out a social media mayday years ago. I posted a photo of me breastfeeding my oldest during Black breastfeeding week. Coming from a family of women who were all told that they didn’t have enough milk, I felt alone in my mission to breastfeed; I felt isolated in a cascade of pain from having been violated during my first birth experience. So, I sent out a simple post, a promise to myself that at least this part of motherhood would be my choice.
Angela Aina and her team saw that post and invited me to be a panelist at BMMA’s second annual convening in Atlanta to talk about my nursing journey. I had an inkling that I absolutely had to attend. That afternoon I met Angela Aina, Dr. Joia Creer Perry, Monica Simpson, Sarawathi Vedam and many other Reproductive Justice trailblazers and luminaries. In my head I nicknamed Angela, “the historian”. I don’t even know if I’ve told her that. She is so brilliant, a visionary and generous. BMMA is the mothership for me. Meeting her and encountering the organization was like being plugged back into a wisdom and lineage that I didn’t even know I had been severed from.
Q. You've been part of the Black maternal health movement for the past 10 years — not as a passing celebrity endorsement, but as someone who has shown-up consistently and with deep intention. When you look back over this decade, what are the moments that stand out most to you? What has moved you, surprised you, or fundamentally changed the way you think about this work?
Tatyana: What has been consistently moving is the level of innovation I‘ve witnessed. One example is BMMA’s naming and codifying this Black Maternal Health Week or Kimberly Seales Allers creating a dedicated Black Breastfeeding Week- both of these observation weeks have become entry points for Black birthing people across the nation. They were my entry point too, my open door to step in.
And I see so much building taking place. In my travels, I get to see the work being done locally across the country- new health care systems being built with extreme legislative and organizational ingenuity. Black women across this nation are applying the Reproductive Justice framework to power new health systems, create cultural change and to greatly improve upon prior attempts to achieve equitable outcomes. The level of care, attention and outright love these leaders are pouring into their communities continues to inspire me.
I have also been fundamentally changed by the depths of depravity and injustice families continue to encounter. I have met mothers, formerly foster children, who have been hounded by the state, whose children have been yanked from them at birth because of bias on the part of hospital staff. I was on the phone once with a mother hiding with her newborn in the bushes in her backyard, because authorities deemed her home birth a sign of neglect and endangerment and were coming to take her child away. I recently met Mercedes Wells who was turned away from the hospital, eventually giving birth on the side of the freeway in her husband’s truck. She held her newborn as she courageously shared her story in Alabama just a month ago. And always, the love we have for our families, our beauty and dignity and sheer force of will overrides these terrible harms.
All of these things put together, have made the imperative clear for me. Community led solutions need to be poured into. The improved outcomes are real, the waiting lists are real, If we put all of our talents and gifts together I know we can build what our families and communities deserve.
Q. From BMMA's perspective, what has it meant to have Tatyana as a partner and advocate across this journey? As you've built this organization from the ground up, what has her presence and commitment represented in the Black Maternal Health movement in ways that go beyond visibility?
Angela: In a movement that has often been exploited for visibility without accountability, Tatyana represents something genuinely different. She has never just lent her face to this work. She has lent her story, her time, her intellect, and her willingness to be transformed by the communities she has walked alongside.
What that has meant for BMMA is hard to fully quantify. There is the visible impact: the reach, the platform, the audiences who found their way to this work because of her voice. But there is something less visible and equally important. When someone with Tatyana’s stature shows up consistently; when she writes an essay for Essence naming BMMA and this broader movement as central to her own journey; when she launches Baby Yams and channels proceeds directly to Black and Indigenous birth workers, it signals to funders, policymakers, and the public that this work is worthy of sustained investment and long-term commitment.
Tatyana has helped legitimize not just BMMA, but the entire infrastructure of community-rooted Black maternal health care. For an organization that has sometimes had to fight to be recognized as the foundational authority in this space, that kind of sustained, principled partnership has meant more than I can easily put into words.
Q. Your relationship with BMMA and the broader movement has clearly evolved over time — from early awareness to the kind of deep engagement we see from you today. How has your understanding of Black maternal health shifted or deepened? What have the mamas, midwives, doulas, and advocates you've encountered along the way taught you that you carry with you now?
Tatyana: In the beginning, I wanted to amplify the work that BMMA and the Reproductive Justice Community have been doing, because just knowing that the work was happening created a healing in me. In the beginning, I thought I could add my hands to the bell to help ring the alarm. I thought that people just must not be paying real attention to what’s been happening to us, to our sisters, our mothers, to our children. I thought that I could use the microphone I’ve had in my hand since I was child, singing and acting and performing for people… I thought I could use that mic to make the alarm that was already going off maybe just a little bit louder.
Along the way I came to the startling realization that not everyone has ears to hear our stories, no matter how loud we speak. So, when I think about how my advocacy has deepened and shifted- it’s in knowing that our stories and innovations deserve sacred space. BMMA does sacred work, has provided sacred space and gatherings where we can build power through connection and knowledge sharing. Black stories, Black creativity, Black research and Black brilliance is powerful. The most insidious part of the systems that are so reliant on our harm, is that they trick us into believing that what we have and what are our hands can make is not good enough. But guess what? We are what we need.
Q. BMMA is celebrating 10 years this year, and the landscape of Black maternal health advocacy looks very different than it did when you started. What are the most significant shifts you've seen in public awareness, policy, and practice — and where do you feel the movement still has the most urgent work to do?
Angela: When we co-founded BMMA in 2016, Black maternal health was largely invisible in the national conversation. The data existed, and the crisis existed, but the political will, media attention, and the public reckoning had not yet arrived. Over the past decade, that has changed in ways that are genuinely meaningful. Now in its ninth year, Black Maternal Health Week has been recognized nationally and internationally. In 2019, the year following our launch of BMHW and BMHC, the Black Maternal Health Caucus in Congress was established. Black midwives, doulas, and community birth workers have been increasingly recognized as essential, not as alternatives to medicine, but as the standard of care Black women deserve. In 2021, the White House formally recognized Black Maternal Health Week with an official proclamation. These are not small things.
Unfortunately, the data hasn’t kept pace with the awareness. Black women in the United States still die from pregnancy-related causes at rates more than twice that of white women. Studies consistently show that more than four out of five of those deaths are preventable. And right now, we are facing an aggressive dismantling of the federal infrastructure that supports maternal health. The CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health has been gutted. Key data systems have been eliminated. The White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis has been hidden. We are not at the beginning of this fight. But we are absolutely not at the end of it.
The most urgent work remaining is permanence. Ensuring that what we have built, in policy, in workforce development, in community infrastructure, cannot be undone by any single political administration. That is what we are working toward.
Q. BMMA was so proud to platform Baby Yams at the 2024 Black Maternal Health Conference and Training Institute. Tell us about the heart behind this project — what inspired you to create it, and how does Baby Yams honor and uplift the rich traditions of Black holistic care, from midwifery to doula support to the ancestral birthing wisdom that has sustained our communities for generations?
Tatyana: Our first in-person shopping event was at BMMA'S 2024 Conference and Training Institute. It meant the world to me to be able share the quilts in person with members of BMMA first. They are the healers, and the whole hope of Baby Yams is to honor and support them.
The first Baby Yams baby quilt was my youngest baby’s receiving blanket. I made him a quilt with Ankara, an iconic West African fabric, gifted to me by a Black Moms group in DC. They hold a conference called the “Momference” every year. At the time, after diving in headfirst and learning everything I could about Reproductive Justice, I started working with a Black midwife, Racha Lawler. Her care was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Her care is what radicalized me and changed my expectations of treatment in every area of my life. While working with her I started making my son’s quilt. I poured all of my feelings into it. All of the expectancy. And all of the joy. My husband and I wrote wishes for our baby that I sewed into it. Those same wishes became the patterns in our Baby Yams quilts.
Baby Yams are coverings. Baby Yams are little storytelling machines. They are a mix of heritage and innovation, much like the new systems being built now. I thought it would be powerful to have something in the marketplace that tells the story of covering and investment. 10% of our proceeds are donated to fund grants for Black and Indigenous midwives and doulas. We have donated to Birth Future Foundation and the National College of Midwifery so far. I'd like to create the capital needed for investment and permanent change.
Q. Why is it so important for the movement to embrace and elevate projects like Baby Yams -- and others BMMA has collaborated over the past decade -- that center storytelling, culture, and tradition alongside policy and systems change?
Angela: There is a painful irony at the heart of this movement that we return to often. The very people whose bodies, labor, and expertise built the foundation of modern obstetrics and maternal care in this country are the ones who are harmed most by that system today. For generations, Black midwives sustained entire communities before being systematically criminalized and pushed out of formal healthcare. Henrietta Lacks gave her cells to cancer research without her knowledge or consent, cells that have contributed to saving millions of lives worldwide.
That is the lineage this movement is rooted in, and projects like Baby Yams are part of how we reclaim it. When Tatyana hand stitches quilts from Ankara fabric, sews blessings into each one, and donates the proceeds directly to Black and Indigenous birth workers, she is making a statement about whose knowledge is valuable and whose labor is worth sustaining. She is practicing cultural continuity as a form of resistance.
Storytelling and cultural practice have always been how Black communities preserved what systems tried to destroy. For BMMA, elevating this kind of work is not a soft complement to policy advocacy. It is policy advocacy by another means. You cannot legislate belonging or mandate dignity. However, you can cultivate it through art, tradition, and the act of being seen, celebrated, and held.
Q. As we look ahead to the next 10 years and beyond, what is your Afrofuturistic vision for Black maternal health? When you imagine a world that truly values, protects, and celebrates Black women's birthing experiences — one rooted in cultural competence, dignity, and joy — what does that world look like?
Tatyana: Funny you should ask this question this way…I end all of my emails with a quote from Octavia Butler, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Under our new sun I see my children safe and joyful. I see the women I am working alongside. I see us all becoming the elders. I see young ones taking the reins, strongly connected to this lineage and refashioning practices to suit their needs locally. But, the way they work will be different. The way they work will honor the cyclical nature of our lives without misuse. I see us hearing one another, believing in one another, and protecting one another. No gaze but the affirming gaze of my sisters will structure anything concerning me. I see our Indigenous and immigrant sisters benefitting from this work. I see an end to harm and exploitation of our bodies and our stories. I see a proliferation of sacred spaces where autonomy is the norm because by our sheer will, what's currently dominating will have to transform in unrecognizable ways or become obsolete. I see ashes of the colonial systems that refused to bend being washed away and life bursting through using that past as fertilizer to grow, grow, grow strong and wild and free. Under our new sun, right beyond the horizon of the one we now know too too well, I see all of us. I see our children, our partners, our loved ones, and our communities safe, nourished and sustained.
Q. And from the organizational and movement-building side — what is BMMA's vision for the next decade? What does it look like to scale this work, deepen its impact, and build the kind of infrastructure that ensures Black maternal health isn't just a moment but a permanent shift in how our society cares for Black women and birthing people?
Angela: Our vision for the next decade is infrastructure that outlasts any single political moment. We have spent ten years proving that this movement is necessary, that it is effective, and that Black-led organizations are uniquely positioned to drive the change that clinical and policy systems alone cannot produce. The work now is to ensure that BMMA and the organizations in our network are structurally resourced to sustain that work for the long haul.
That means continuing to build out our workforce development pipeline so that Black birth workers, researchers, clinicians, and advocates have the training, mentorship, and professional homes they need to lead this field. It means deepening our international connections, because the experiences of Black and Indigenous birthing people in the UK, Canada, the Caribbean, and across the African continent are part of the same movement, experiencing similar inequities and inhumane treatment, and calling for similar healthcare transformations. It means remaining uncompromising about what genuine progress actually requires: not inclusion by invitation, not race-neutral policy frameworks that erase the specific harms facing Black women, but real structural redistribution of resources, power, and decision-making authority to Black communities.
Q. If you could speak directly to a Black mama right now — someone who is pregnant, postpartum, or planning to start her family — what would you want her/them to know? What would you want her/them to feel in this moment?
Angela: First and foremost: you are not the problem. Everything in our society that tries to make you feel otherwise is lying to you. The data, the disparities, the headlines: none of it reflects something broken in you. It reflects a system that was never built with you fully in mind. But know that the Black Maternal Health Movement is working every single day to change that.
What I also want you to know is that you have the right to demand the care you deserve. You have the right to a provider who listens to you, who believes you, who respects your body and your choices. You have the right to a birth worker who honors your traditions, your preferences, and your power. These are not privileges. They are your rights.
You have the right to joy. Pure, full, unqualified joy in your pregnancy, your birth, your postpartum experience, your motherhood, and your parenthood. That joy is not conditional on a perfect system. It is yours right now, as you are, wherever you are in this journey. Claim it. Protect it. You are rooted in generations of Black women who carried life and wisdom forward, even in the hardest of circumstances. You carry all of that with you. And there are Black women, across this country and across the world, who are building the systems to make sure you are held the way you deserve to be held. You are not alone in this. You have never been and will never be.
Tatyana: I want that mama to know that there is a community of people working on her behalf. That she is loved and considered by people who she’s never met. And that she deserves the best of everything. Mama, don’t let small indignities, the ones we are so used to overlooking, slide. Be fierce and exacting in your discernment. Pay attention to every micro-aggression and seek care where you are treasured. There are organizations and helpers not far from you that can help you in your search.
Get Involved
Want to become involved with Black Maternal Health Week? Sign up for BMMA’s newsletter at blackmamasmatter.org/connect and learn more about Black Maternal Health in your neighborhood by visiting blkmaternalhealthweek.com.
