Chosen Vessels Midwifery Services

03/19/2026

Reproductive Coercion: Cherise Doyley was in labor when the hospital sought an emergency hearing to force her to have a C-section. The choice would not be hers. The judge would decide how she would give birth. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/16/health/c-section-birth-judge-propublica

03/10/2026

An image of a Black fetus in a womb by Nigerian medical student and illustrator Chidiebere Ibe went viral four years ago, with many noting they had never seen dark skin in these types of images.

It also highlights the need for diversity in medical illustrations.

03/01/2026

I love being a Midwife, deep down in my soul!

She delivered over 3,000 babies. Never lost a mother. The state said she was unqualified.

Long before there were hospitals in the rural South, long before a Black family could walk through the front door of any clinic that would see them, there was a woman in the community who knew what to do when a baby was coming.

She was not called a doctor. She did not have a medical degree framed on her wall or a stethoscope around her neck. What she had was knowledge, passed down through generations of women who had learned to bring life into the world under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

They called her the Granny Midwife, and for more than two centuries, she was the backbone of maternal care in Black communities across the American South.

Her roots run deeper than the rural farmhouses where she worked.

When enslaved African women were brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, they brought their knowledge with them. West African healing traditions included sophisticated practices around pregnancy, labor, birth, and the care of mothers and infants, and those practices did not disappear when ships crossed the ocean.

They survived in the hands and memories of enslaved women who became the primary birth attendants on plantations, because the plantation owners needed them to be.

Enslaved women on plantations served as what one historical account described as the sole matron, midwife, nurse, physician, surgeon, and servant in their communities.

Physicians were expensive, plantations were remote, and labor did not wait for a doctor to arrive from town. So it was the enslaved midwife who answered when a laboring woman called out in the night, for Black mothers and for white ones.

Some enslaved midwives were hired out to neighboring plantations, permitted to travel to attend births across the county, which in a world designed to trap and immobilize them represented a rare and carefully protected form of mobility.

After emancipation, the granny midwives did not disappear. They became more essential than ever.

With no hospitals serving Black communities, no physicians willing to make the journey to rural areas, and segregation ensuring that what medical care existed was largely inaccessible to Black families, the granny midwife was often the only qualified birth attendant within miles.

She attended labor and delivery. She counseled mothers through breastfeeding. She returned in the days after birth to monitor the mother and infant. She watched for postpartum complications. She was nutritionist, counselor, doula, and community anchor, not because she was expected to wear all of those roles, but because no one else in her community was coming to do it.

She served everyone.

White families in rural areas, just as isolated from physicians as their Black neighbors, relied on granny midwives too, which made the knowledge these women carried a community resource that crossed racial lines even inside a society structured entirely around maintaining them.

Around 50 percent of all births in the United States were attended by midwives in the year 1900. By 1930, that number had dropped to approximately 15 percent.

What happened in those three decades is not simply the story of medical progress. It is the story of a deliberate campaign.

In 1859, the American Medical Association designated obstetrics as one of four core branches of practical medicine, a move that set the stage for physicians to claim authority over childbirth and position midwives as their competitors.

Julius Levy, a physician and researcher at the Bureau of Child Hygiene in New Jersey, found through documented research that the lowest maternal mortality rate in American cities was found in the city with the highest percentage of births delivered by midwives.

The data did not slow the campaign.

In 1921, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, legislation framed as an effort to reduce infant and maternal mortality by funding midwifery training and licensing programs across the country.

On the surface, it sounded like support for the granny midwives. In practice, it was the mechanism of their removal.

The act targeted Black midwives in the South specifically, who represented the largest group of unregulated birth attendants in the country. States established midwifery training classes taught by public health nurses, many of whom had considerably less experience attending actual births than the women they were being sent to instruct.

A Black woman who had delivered thousands of babies across decades of practice was now required to prove herself acceptable to a state that had never once asked her community whether she was doing the work.

Many of the granny midwives were elderly, poor, and rural, unable to travel to certification classes, unable to meet the paperwork requirements, and unable to navigate a bureaucratic system designed without them in mind.

In 1941, the Tuskegee School of Nurse-Midwifery opened in Alabama, explicitly designed to increase the number of Black nurse-midwives. It closed five years later, in 1946, due to a lack of funding, before it had trained enough graduates to replace what the regulations were already eliminating.

By 1950, midwives attended only 5 percent of all births in the United States, though they still attended approximately 25 percent of all non-white births, an imbalance that reveals exactly whose communities had been abandoned by the medical establishment the regulations were designed to protect.

Through all of this, some granny midwives held on.

Maude Callen was born in Florida in 1898, trained as a nurse-midwife, and arrived in Pineville, South Carolina in 1923. Over the course of her career she delivered an estimated 600 to 800 babies and trained hundreds of other midwives across the region. LIFE Magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith followed her for a landmark photo essay published in 1951. She practiced until her retirement in 1971 and was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame.

Margaret Charles Smith was born in Alabama in 1906. She became a licensed midwife in Greene County, Alabama in 1949, and over her career attended nearly 3,000 births. She never lost a mother. She co-authored her autobiography, Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife, at the age of 91.

Onnie Lee Logan was born around 1910 in Alabama, the daughter and granddaughter of midwives. She practiced for most of her adult life while also working as a maid to make ends meet, delivering the majority of her patients for free because most of them had nothing to pay her with. Her autobiography, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, published in 1989, became an immediate classic.

These women did not just deliver babies. They held communities together at their most vulnerable moments, and they did it across decades of being told by the medical establishment that they were the problem.

The consequence of erasing them is not theoretical.

Researchers and public health advocates have drawn a direct connection between the decline of Black midwives in the mid-20th century and the persistent rise in Black maternal and infant mortality rates that followed.

The communities that lost their granny midwives did not replace them with physicians who showed up at 2 a.m. on dirt roads. They replaced them with nothing.

Today, Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related causes at two to three times the rate of white women.

Today, the number of Black midwives in the United States remains critically low.

Those two facts are connected. The historians, the researchers, and the data say so plainly.

The granny midwife carried the knowledge of generations in her hands. She walked through mud and crossed rivers and showed up in the dark without being asked twice.

Teach this. Teach the granny midwives alongside Florence Nightingale. Teach the Sheppard-Towner Act alongside the progress narratives of 20th-century medicine. Teach the names Margaret Charles Smith, Onnie Lee Logan, and Maude Callen to every generation that comes after this one.

They built the foundation that modern midwifery stands on. The foundation deserves to know its own name.

SOURCES

TIME Magazine — The History That Explains Today's Shortage of Black Midwives
Used for: midwife birth percentages, Tuskegee School, Julius Levy finding, maternal mortality link

Santa Clara University — The Decline of Southern Black Midwifery in the 20th Century
Used for: AMA 1859 obstetrics claim, enslaved midwives serving white families, plantation context

Weitzman Institute — Continuing the Legacy of Granny Midwives
Used for: Sheppard-Towner Act details, licensing campaign, midwife roles as counselor and doula

UVA School of Nursing — Black Midwifery's Complex History
Used for: Sheppard-Towner targeting Black midwives, untrained supervisors overseeing experienced women

South Carolina ETV — Maude Callen: SC Hall of Fame
Used for: Maude Callen career, 600-800 births delivered, retirement 1971

Frontier Nursing University — Celebrating Black Grand Midwives
Used for: Margaret Charles Smith, nearly 3,000 births, never lost a mother, autobiography 1996

We Are DTI — A Brief History of Black Midwifery in the US
Used for: Onnie Lee Logan biography, family midwifery lineage, Motherwit autobiography

PMC / American Journal of Public Health — Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery
Used for: Black women dying at 2-3x the rate of white women, structural racism in obstetrics

SF Community Health — The Importance of Black Midwives
Used for: West African birthing knowledge carried through the slave trade

Black Midwifery Collective — History of Midwifery
Used for: End of legal lay midwifery by 1970s, state-by-state permit removals

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
Every coffee helps me keep creating.

02/26/2026

Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy❣️

She was 17 years old. Seventeen.
An age where dreams should be forming — not scars.

Her name was Anarcha.

History tried to reduce her to a case study. A surgical problem. A “successful outcome.” But before she was a subject in a medical journal, she was a young Black girl — enslaved, exhausted, and in unimaginable pain.

After a traumatic childbirth that left her with obstetric fistula — a devastating injury that causes constant internal tearing and incontinence — Anarcha should have been met with care. Instead, she was handed over to experimentation.

For four years.

Over thirty surgeries.

No anesthesia.

No consent.

No mercy.

The man who stood before her, instruments in hand, was Dr. J. Marion Sims — a name that would later be etched into marble and bronze as the “Father of Gynecology.” Medical institutions honored him. Statues rose in his likeness. His surgical techniques were praised as breakthroughs.

But breakthroughs for whom?

Because while he was perfecting procedures, Anarcha was perfecting endurance. While he was building a reputation, she was surviving violation after violation on a wooden table, held down, exposed, and cut open under the false, racist belief that Black women did not feel pain the way white women did.

That lie was not just ignorance. It was strategy. It was justification. It was the foundation of a medical myth that still breathes.

And we are still living with its consequences.

Today, Black women’s pain is statistically undertreated. Their symptoms are dismissed. Their warnings are questioned. Studies continue to show that some medical professionals falsely believe Black patients have thicker skin, less sensitive nerve endings, or higher pain tolerance. This is not ancient history — it is current practice shaped by historical violence.

In England, Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or within six weeks of childbirth than white women. In the United States, Black maternal mortality rates are staggeringly high — regardless of income or education.

Even Black women with access.
Even Black women with degrees.
Even Black women who speak up.

The pattern echoes Anarcha’s silence — a silence forced upon her.

But here is what history cannot erase:

Anarcha survived.

Her body endured what should have broken a human spirit. Though her voice was never recorded, her existence testifies. She is not merely a footnote in medical advancement. She is the cost.

When statues of J. Marion Sims were removed from public spaces, some called it revisionism. But telling the whole truth is not erasing history — it is finally telling it honestly. Progress built on suffering must acknowledge the suffering.

We do not say Anarcha’s name to live in pain.
We say it because she deserved to be known.

She deserved gentleness.
She deserved choice.
She deserved anesthesia.
She deserved humanity.

And every time a Black woman today says, “Something feels wrong,” and is ignored — that history whispers.

So let us speak louder.

Let us honor Anarcha not only with remembrance, but with action — with advocacy for equitable healthcare, with belief in Black women’s voices, with accountability in medicine.

She was seventeen.

She was not given a voice.

But today — we give her one. ❤️💚🖤

Every like, comment, and share reminds us that this history matters. If you’d like to help us continue researching and posting these stories, you can support us here:

https://buymeacoffee.com/africanamericanhistory

Every coffee helps me keep creating.

02/22/2026

Most people have never heard of the Fultz Sisters. That is exactly the problem, because their story tells you everything about how Black children have been used, exploited, and forgotten in this country.

They came into the world on May 23, 1946, in North Carolina, four tiny girls weighing three pounds each, arriving together in a moment that was genuinely remarkable and genuinely rare. Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were the first identical Black American quadruplets ever recorded in the United States, and from the very first hours of their lives, the world around them began making decisions about who they were and what they were worth without ever once asking their parents what they wanted.

Their mother, Annie Mae Fultz, was deaf and could not speak. Their father, Pete Fultz, was a sharecropper. Neither of them could read or write. They already had six other children, and they were living a life of genuine financial hardship on a farm in North Carolina, doing what Black families across the rural South had always done, finding a way to hold themselves together in a country that offered them very little help in doing so.

They were a family. They were not a spectacle. But the man who delivered those four babies saw something different when he looked at them.

Dr. Fred Klenner was the physician who delivered the quadruplets, and from the beginning his relationship with the Fultz family carried a troubling imbalance of power. Because Pete and Annie Mae could not read, they were dependent on others to interpret documents, explain agreements, and navigate a world that communicated primarily through written language. Dr. Klenner understood this. And rather than using that understanding to protect them, he used it to position himself at the center of everything that followed.

He named the girls himself, deciding without apparent hesitation that four children born to a Black family in the rural South did not need their parents to choose their names. He named them all Mary, after women in his own family. Mary Louise. Mary Ann. Mary Alice. Mary Catherine. Four individuals, each given a name that belonged more to someone else's legacy than to their own.

He also, during Annie Mae's pregnancy, administered high doses of vitamin C as part of his own personal medical research, using her body as a subject in an experiment she likely did not fully understand and almost certainly did not meaningfully consent to.

And then, before the girls were old enough to sit up on their own, he opened their home to strangers.

Klenner arranged for visitors to come to the Fultz home to see the Black quadruplets, setting up a schedule of visitation that turned a family's private space into something closer to a public exhibition. The babies were placed in a glass-enclosed nursery where curious onlookers could observe them as though they were a curiosity to be studied rather than children to be cherished. National media attention followed, and with that attention came exactly the kind of commercial interest that Dr. Klenner had been positioning himself to broker.

Pet Milk, a major dairy brand looking to expand its reach into the Black American consumer market, recognized in the Fultz sisters an opportunity. Dr. Klenner negotiated the deal between the company and the family. Pet Milk would sponsor the girls, and in exchange the family would receive a nurse, a new home, and a farm.

It sounded, on paper, like something that might genuinely help a struggling family. But the cost was carried by the children.

The girls were taken off their mother's breast milk and fed Pet Milk's product instead, a decision made not for their health but for the integrity of a commercial arrangement. From that point forward, the Fultz sisters were not just children growing up in North Carolina. They were a marketing campaign.

From 1947 to 1968, for more than two decades of their childhood and young adult lives, the sisters traveled across the country promoting Pet Milk. They appeared in magazines. They marched in parades. They attended events, shook hands, smiled for cameras, and represented a brand that had decided their faces were the most effective way to sell condensed milk to Black American households.

They met President Harry Truman. They met President John F. Kennedy. They were photographed alongside tennis legend Althea Gibson and boxing champion Floyd Patterson. Their fifth birthday party was broadcast on television, a moment of genuine joy offered to a watching public that had no idea what these little girls were carrying behind their smiles.

And throughout all of it, Dr. Klenner continued his vitamin C research, injecting the girls with dangerously high levels of the vitamin as part of his ongoing experiments, treating their bodies as data points in a study they had not agreed to participate in and could not have understood even if someone had thought to explain it to them.

This was their childhood. Public, managed, commercially owned, and medically exploited, wrapped in the appearance of opportunity while something essential was quietly being taken from them.

The girls did find moments of genuine achievement within the life that had been shaped around them. They attended Bethune-Cookman College on music scholarships, a testament to their own talents and to the legacy of that great institution of Black higher education founded by Mary McLeod Bethune. They studied for two years before leaving school and eventually working as nurses' aides, choosing a life of caring for others after spending so much of their own lives being handled rather than cared for.

And then, one by one, they began to die.

Mary Louise passed in 1991 at the age of forty-five. Mary Ann followed in 1995 at forty-nine. Mary Alice died in 2001 at fifty-five. Mary Catherine, the last of the four, passed in 2018 at seventy-two.

Every single one of them died of breast cancer.

That detail is not a footnote. It sits at the end of their story like a weight that refuses to be lifted, and it demands to be examined alongside everything else that was done to their bodies without their consent from the very beginning of their lives. We may never know with certainty what role the medical experiments they were subjected to as infants and children played in the health outcomes they experienced as women. But we know that four sisters, born together, died of the same disease, and that their bodies had been used for someone else's purposes since before they could walk.

They deserved better. Every single day of their lives, they deserved better.

They deserved parents who could have advocated for them fully and freely without being disadvantaged by illiteracy in a system designed to exploit exactly that vulnerability. They deserved a doctor who saw them as patients rather than subjects. They deserved a childhood that belonged to them rather than to a brand. They deserved to grow old, all four of them, together.

What the Fultz sisters' story reveals is something that Black families across America have known for generations, that Black life, and particularly Black childhood, has never been safe from the appetites of institutions and individuals who saw in Black bodies an opportunity to profit, to experiment, to display, and to use.

It is a story that echoes across centuries, from the exploitation of enslaved people's bodies for medical knowledge that built modern American medicine, to the Tuskegee experiments, to the quadruplets in a glass nursery in North Carolina whose names were chosen by a man who saw them as an extension of his own ambitions before they were a single day old.

And yet even within all of that, the Fultz sisters lived. They traveled and they sang and they studied and they worked and they cared for sick people and they loved each other across a lifetime of shared experience that no amount of exploitation could fully reach. Their bond was their own. Their love for one another was their own. And their story, finally told on their own terms, belongs to all of us now.

Black history is so much deeper than what we were taught in school. It lives in the stories of four little girls at three pounds each, placed behind glass for strangers to stare at, growing up into women who somehow, through everything, held on to each other until the very end.

Teach this story. Share it. Say their names. And remember that honoring Black history means honoring all of it, including the parts that make us uncomfortable, including the parts that reveal how much was taken, and including the parts that show, even in the taking, the undeniable and unbreakable dignity of Black life.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.

02/22/2026

Before hospitals opened their doors to us,
Black women were already delivering the nation.

By lantern light. In wooden homes.
With wisdom passed down through generations.

No recognition. No protection. No respect from the system.

But entire towns trusted them.

Black midwives carried life in their hands while this country questioned their worth.

02/21/2026

Wonderful presentation on our female reality. On top of that I wonder who speaks up for us?

02/21/2026

02/20/2026

Tiffany Woods, a Louisiana mother convicted of second-degree murder for the 2005 death of her infant son following Hurricane Katrina, has been denied parole. Although the Louisiana State Parole Board recognized her rehabilitation and progress while incarcerated, they denied her release due to the severity of the child's condition and strong opposition from prosecutors.

After evacuating from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Woods, then 25, ran out of baby formula and began feeding her 5-month-old son, Emmanuel, organic cow's milk. The infant died of severe malnutrition in November 2005.

In 2008, Woods and the baby's father were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to mandatory life in prison.

In 2023, former Gov. John Bel Edwards commuted her sentence to 36 years following a recommendation from the state pardon board, making her eligible for parole.

Two of the three parole board members supported her release, praising her, but a unanimous vote was required. Board member Carolyn Stapleton denied the request, citing the "pitiful" condition of the malnourished child and opposition from the Caddo Parish District Attorney's office.

While in prison, Woods earned a bachelor's degree, was not a disciplinary problem, and was described as "low risk".

Woods is now required to wait five years to reapply for parole, though she is projected to be released in 10 years with "good time" credit.

11/06/2025

11/01/2025

✨ Theme Announcement ✨

We’re thrilled to share the official theme for Black Maternal Health Week 2026 (April 11-17):
💜Rooted in Justice & Joy.💜

Black Maternal Health Week (BMHW26) is BMMA’s annual campaign to raise awareness, inspire action, and build community through amplifying the voices and lived experiences of Black Mamas and birthing people.

This is the time to join BMMA in celebration as we mark 2026 as our 10-year anniversary. We honor the power of our collective movement, nurturing thriving families and shaping a liberated future rooted in justice, healing, and joy.

Stay connected and be the first to know what’s ahead: blackmamasmatter.org/connect