UC Berkeley\u2019s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health has been supporting BElovedBIRTH Black Centering \u2014 a health initiative focused on Black birthing people with prenatal and postpartum care.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Wallace Center has been publishing research of the BElovedBIRTH Black Centering, highlighting its successes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe envision a world where Black birthing people have all the support, loving care, and resources needed to have happy, healthy, and safe pregnancies, births, and postpartum recoveries; free from obstetric racism,\u201d according to the BElovedBIRTH website.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BElovedBIRTH Black Centering is a program pioneered by the Alameda Health System and provides multiple resources, including midwifery and doula care. Midwife services are closely aligned to the medical work of an obstetrics and gynecological specialist, while a doula is the birthing person\u2019s advocate, both pre- and postnatal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Alameda County Public Health Department also provides \u201cwrap-around\u201d support services for the center, including childcare, housing and nutrition resources. The program also provides culturally aligned childbirth education, consisting of two-hour group sessions with Black birthing people under the guidance of a midwife.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A key pillar of BElovedBIRTH is that the entire staff is Black, so every patient interacts with a clinician who is racially concordant with them, noted Marisol De Ornelas, a doctoral student at the Wallace Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe program provides different self-care practices grounded in mindfulness, resilience, self-compassion,\u201d De Ornelas added. \u201cIt grounds it in the reality of being a Black woman in the United States and how to go through pregnancy and postpartum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Wallace Center is a research partner with the Alameda Health Services Highland Hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Lindsay Parham, executive director of the Wallace Center, BElovedBIRTH is one of the first projects the Center has undertaken in collaboration with Highland Hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are helping give them an arsenal of information to go out and increase the reach of the program,\u201d Parham said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Wallace Center gathers both quantitative and qualitative data from participants and non-participants to analyze the impact of the program and to help it grow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
De Ornelas mentioned that patients report positive experiences with the social and community aspect of the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Research by the Wallace Center includes a 2024 report that found babies in the BElovedBIRTH Black Centering program were born later and heavier than babies born in the Alameda County Health system who did not participate in the program.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of the period of time that people were in the program, we saw statistically significant impacts on preterm birth, low birth weight,\u201d Parham said. \u201cFrom speaking with the patients who participated in the program, we know people love it. They feel so supported. They feel seen. They feel safe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UC Berkeley\u2019s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health has been supporting BElovedBIRTH Black Centering \u2014 a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49234,79200,79199,79197,3409,79202,79201,143,145,144,149,79198],"class_list":["post-163571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-alameda-health-system","tag-alameda-public-health","tag-and-adolescent-health","tag-belovedbirth-black-centering","tag-child","tag-lindsay-parham","tag-marisol-de-ornelas","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-wallace-center-for-maternal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}