Motherhood Beyond Bars - The Impacts of Incarceration for Pregnant Families

Motherhood Beyond Bars (MBB) is a nonprofit organization that breaks cycles of incarceration in families. We believe that every mother, every child, and every family deserves an opportunity to write a new script, to transform the trajectory of their lives, and to be supported by love and compassion in the process of that transformation.

MBB provides direct aid, health education, and community support to justice-involved pregnant women and new mothers in jail, prisons, and women serving a sentence on probation or parole. We also support infants born to, and separated from, their mothers in Georgia prisons with a particular focus on maintaining bonds between very young children and their incarcerated parents.

In this seminar, we'll discuss the epidemic of mass incarceration in the United States and how women have been disproportionally affected. We'll talk about the experience of being pregnant in prison and jail, the lack of standardization in providing care to pregnant and postpartum people in carceral settings and the impact of maternal incarceration on multiple generations in families.

The concept of Reclaiming Birth emphasizes how equitable access to support during the childbearing year and client driven vs client centered care can have a drastic impact on birthing outcomes.

Erica Guthaus touches on:

• The midwifery model of care

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

• Community centered maternal care from the early 1900s.

Anecdotally, Rootead has found that increasing maternal support levels while decreasing barriers to access has been impactful to closing the racial disparities in birth outcomes. Additionally, when we return power to birthing people by listening to their experiences and allowing them to shape our work in real time, we may be able to eradicate the disparity completely.

As we wrap up, you should be able to:

• Clearly identify the difference between client/patient centered care and client/patient driven care

• Have expanded ideas on how to humanize equitable access and

• Have increased understanding of how returning autonomy and power from the MIC to the birthing person is a significant missing piece in the improved outcome conversation

Culturally Sensitive Birth Support for Refugees

Meet with Virginia Tester and Heidi Copeland of Embrace Refugee Birth as we discuss the importance of culturally sensitive care for refugee and immigrant families and offer skills and experience around how to help advocate for and empower foreign born pregnant people to have empowered, culturally sensitive pregnancy and birth experiences.

If you’ve ever wanted to support refugees in your community this is a great place to start!

Virginia Tester is the Program Director for Embrace Refugee Birth. She is an Atlanta native with academic and clinical experience in women's health and more than seven years of previous volunteer involvement with Embrace and the Friends of Refugees family before becoming the director of Embrace. With her background as a Certified Nurse Midwife, Virginia's work is grounded in the approach that culturally sensitive care empowers birthing folks with knowledge to make healthy choices for themselves and their families. Virginia maintains her certification as a Family Nurse Practitioner and interests in holistic health, social justice, and patient-centered care.

Heidi Copeland is the Program Impact Manager of Embrace. She is a certified labor doula with DONA. Originally from Antioch, Tennessee, she received a Bachelor of Social Work from Lipscomb University in Nashville.

If you’d like a certificate of completion, please fill out the below form. Any questions please contact Embrace at embrace.birth@friendsofrefugees.com

Pregnancy & Infant Loss

How do we hold space for families going through pregnancy and infant loss? How can we better support families and honor the baby whose life was so short. Dianna will offer an introduction to her Pregnancy and Infant Loss class and offer providers and families tools to better support each other during these tragedies that affect many families.

ABOUT DIANNA

Dianna Vagianos Armentrout is a writer, teacher, workshop facilitator and poetry therapist. Dianna’s pregnancy with her daughter, Mary Rose, who died an hour after birth of Trisomy 18, changed her life and writing completely. Her memoir Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart: A Journey of Pregnancy, Grief and Newborn Death was published to support others going through pregnancies with life-limiting and fatal diagnoses and grief. Dianna is available to train doulas and providers to better support their clients who experience pregnancy and infant loss. She offers classes in person and online, as well as private consulting.

Dianna is currently finishing her novel about her female Greek ancestors. She lives in Littleton, Colorado, and blogs at www.diannavagianos.com

How Trauma Impacts the Body

Learn how the body responds to trauma after birth and what some of the symptoms are and ways to help release the trauma. Also covered are ways to avoid trauma in the first place.

About Lynn

Lynn Schulte is a Women’s Health Physical Therapist for over 30 years and founder of the Institute for Birth Healing. She has been helping moms heal from all the issues women experience after birth and is now teaching courses to body-workers to help them do the same. She found a common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis after birth and knows how to effectively release these patterns.

Knowing we are more than just our bodies, Lynn works on all levels, physically, energetically, and spiritually with women to help them access their full potential. She also teaches body-workers how to work with the energy of the body and how to access and use your intuition in your bodywork sessions. She offers a certification process to help birth professionals become Birth Healing Specialists.

Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from St. Louis University, St. Louis Missouri. A true teacher, Lynn continues to supplement her professional experience with training to complement and update her practice.

Cultivating Humility - A Tool for Allyship

We’ve heard it again and again: don’t get defensive when someone tells you that you’ve messed up. But HOW exactly do you combat defensiveness? How can you stay open and receptive to feedback, especially when it’s connected to race, gender, or other identities? Spend time with trans educator Trystan Reese as he shares one of the practical tools he’s created for his trans allyship training for birthworkers.

You’ll get a chance to unpack why you might have a hard time receiving feedback well, how to proactively solicit helpful feedback from those you’re working to support, and how to hack your own insecurities so feedback becomes something you’re excited to receive! This session will be presented with racial justice, trans justice, and trauma informed lenses.

ABOUT TRYSTAN

Trystan, speaker, activist and father of three, helps communities and organizations make their spaces safer for trans and gender non-conforming people through trainings, groups, and consulting. 

Using Birth Stories in a Childbirth Class

ABOUT VIRGINIA

Virginia has been shaped by many forces. She birthed and raised three wonderful children to adulthood. She is an artist, storyteller, mentor, traveler, healer, coach, writer, dancer, trainer, and business leader. Her passion, focus, experience, and talent is in offering compassionate creative processes and deep inquiry to those courageous enough to pursue a wholehearted life.

For over twenty years, she has been educating, supporting, and counseling expectant and new families as they transition through birth and into parenthood (as a lactation counselor, doula, and childbirth educator).  As a trainer and managing director for Birthing From Within for ten years, Virginia developed and led many training’s and programs, giving her the amazing gift of traveling the world and working with thousands of parents and birth professionals.

Virginia’s approach is trauma-aware, LGBTIA+ inclusive, and nonjudgmental.

NEUROBIOLOGY - THE POWER AND SCIENCE OF CONNECTION

Explore why it matters so much for members of the perinatal healthcare field to co-regulate themselves with the birthing person and how to strengthen the connection between all members of the birth team (but especially the partner!) in order to facilitate easier birth and increased confidence in new parenting.

ABOUT BARB -

Barb Buckner Suárez, BA, LCCE, FACCE, BU is a Lamaze certified Childbirth Educator, a Fellow in the Academy of Certified Childbirth Educators, a certified Becoming Us Facilitator and Mentor, and she also holds a Certificate in Interpersonal Neurobiology.

For more than twenty years, Barb has helped thousands of families prepare for the life-changing event of becoming parents by offering current, evidence-based information through classes, labor support and couples coaching sessions. She’s fascinated by the brain-body interaction during pregnancy, birth and new parenting and believes in the science of connection to create strong families.

Pelvic Floor - Ways to Facilitate a Smoother Birth and Faster Recovery

Join in to understand the 3 main areas of the body needing assessment prior to birth, why kegels are NOT a good idea in pregnancy, and what happens to the pelvis after birth and how you can help support moms in a faster recovery.

ABOUT LYNN SCHULTE

Lynn Schulte is a Women’s Health Physical Therapist for over 30 years and founder of the Institute for Birth Healing. She has been helping moms heal from all the issues women experience after birth and is now teaching courses to bodyworkers to help them do the same. She found a common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis after birth and knows how to effectively release these patterns.

Knowing we are more than just our bodies, Lynn works on all levels, physically, energetically, and spiritually with women to help them access their full potential. She also teaches bodyworkers how to work with the energy of the body and how to access and use your intuition in your bodywork sessions. She offers a certification process to help birth professionals become Birth Healing Specialists.

Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from St. Louis University, St. Louis Missouri. A true teacher, Lynn continues to supplement her professional experience with training to complement and update her practice.

SUPPORTING DISABLED AND CHRONICALLY ILL CLIENTS

Amy Miller is a disabled, queer, full spectrum birth worker from Midland, Ontario. She is dedicated to supporting and advocating for disabled community especially in her role as a birth worker and parent to a toddler with disabilities.

RESOURCES:

• Care Work - Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

• The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability

• The Disabled Woman’s Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Judith Rogers

• Crip Camp - Netflix Documentary - A groundbreaking summer camp galvanized a group of teens with disabilities to help build a movement, forging a new path toward greater equality.

FEMORAL ROTATION AND THE BIRTHING PELVIS

One of the simplest shifts we can make in the way we support and encourage labor progress is to adjust the positions that we suggest to laboring people at different points during the process.

Through understanding the role of pressure on pelvic dynamics, we can offer suggestions for facilitating labor progress, fetal descent and rotation, and preventing unnecessary intervention and perineal trauma.

Brittany Sharpe McCollum, CCE(BWI), CD(DONA) is the owner of Blossoming Bellies Wholistic Birth Services in Philadelphia PA, providing childbirth education classes, birth doula services, and dynamic labor support and pelvic biomechanics training workshops for birth professionals and expectant parents.