Florena Birth Perinatal Experts

07/14/2025

An oldie but a goodie 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

06/04/2025

Gentle cesarean vs extracting a human from a human as if both were machines

03/28/2025

I am SO PROUD to know this incredible woman! 💖

I’m honoured to receive the Legacy Achievement Award in Black Maternal Health from The Motherhood Group.

For over 20 years, I’ve spoken up—on TV, radio, in Parliament, roundtables, podcasts, research, and beyond. I’ve refused to dilute the truth for anyone’s comfort.

I stand on the shoulders of Elsie Gayle, who first called out the racism in maternity care. I created Abuela Doulas when I was told there was no need—and built it to be unapologetically inclusive from the start.

This award is deeply meaningful, but I’m not done yet.

To those coming after: I see you. I salute you.
To those who’ve told me how I’ve impacted you: I’m grateful.
To Lorna Phillip, who keeps supporting and challenging me: thank you.

We keep going.

03/25/2025

✅ Dishes done
✅ Lactation support
✅Laundry started
✅Living area tidied
✅Parents BOTH napping
✅Gassy baby relieved and snuggling

Let us be your village! Crowdsource birth and postpartum by putting us on your registry
Contacts in linktree

💖hand knit socks courtesy of Auntie K .higgins.64
💚fav colour scrub pants courtesy of

03/11/2025

Something we need to talk about as maternity care providers in Canada (and abroad in many places I’m sure): we’re failing breastfeeding families with our collective lack of knowledge/lack of cohesiveness in our advice.

So many times as I’m talking with new parents they are reeling from the early challenges of their lactation journeys. They are confused and frustrated with the conflicting advice they’ve received from the hospital nurses (L&D, postpartum, pediatric follow up), hospital & private IBCLCs, midwives and doctors (OBs, GPs, pediatricians).

How did we get to 2025 without having robust, standardized, evidence-based lactation education for maternity care providers? What can we do about it so more parents can avoid the suffering and guilt associated with trying their best and “failing” at breastfeeding? Why aren’t we all on the same page?

11/13/2024

💯🥰

Here's the thing. Lactation is a human right, for humans who want to make milk and provide that for their babies. Supporting humans in doing this is a community responsibility and for me personally something I see as an immense honor that I take very seriously. That includes ALL people, absolutely including and uplifting trans women through inducing lactation or offering at-body feedings with supplementation and every other option and also trans men in chestfeeding or suppressing lactation or any other option they choose, as well encompassing respectful and inclusive language and care measures for all trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, and gender expansive relatives.

Lactation as a human right has been systemically interrupted and attacked in targeted communities starting with settler colonialism and generational enslavement of families, forced wet nursing, destruction and separation of Black and Indigenous families, and continuing on through current times through the child services to prison pipeline, predatory formula marketing, bias in healthcare and so much more.

Lactation as an industry is rooted in the settler colonial destruction of physiologic norms as social standards. Lactation relationships are destroyed by the society we live in, which creates a situation in which lactation becomes a privilege but also sometimes a risk factor and an opening for ongoing harm. People from these targeted communities have long felt the consequences of receiving "care" from an industry rooted in oppression, and yet outside of our communities, there is still shock when the voice comes from inside the house.

Lactation and birth groups are afire with conversation about the news that one of the founding members of LLL, Marian Tompson, has resigned in a hateful anti-trans letter to the board, and other trustees have gone with her.

LLL has perpetrated so much harm over the years, and has pushed back so vocally against inclusivity, I am zero percent surprised. I don't really have a concise point to make, just some meandering observations. I think it boils down to...look at the houses you are living in....at the foundations they have been built on and the walls that they have erected. When it is baked in so deeply - whether that is an industry or a certifying body or an entire government...at what point do we stop trying to remodel and instead build a new house? So, while I am glad to see someone with those views exit an organization (any org - all orgs!) it also just reminds me that one person is not the problem....it's the systems.

11/02/2024

The folks at Shiphrah (one of the two organizations under the HELP International umbrella along with TLC The Little Children’s Home) were instrumental in bringing me from doula with no hand skills to primary under supervision in my midwifery journey.

The staff of both places will always hold a special gratitude place in my heart. The Little Children’s Home is more than an orphanage, although they do operate in that role. It’s a landing place for families in crisis situations who don’t have any place to go. The incredibly caring staff there take children on indefinitely, but the first aim is always to reunite the children with loving biological family if possible and safe. Next is to help unite children with adoptive families and make that transition as smooth as possible with as little trauma as possible.

These are people with hearts as big as the sun ☀️

Please consider helping make their burdens a little lighter by sponsoring a staple food for them. Each of the 30 staff are to be gifted a 50kg sack of rice for Christmas. One sack costs $50 USD.
If you have some $$ to spare, please follow the links in the comments of the video. I’ll post Canadian account for receiving donations in the comments on this post.