Baby Yams proceeds fund grants for Black, Indigenous birth workers
In an interview with NPR published Sunday, Ali said she had a normal pregnancy with Aszi and that the days of waiting for his birth had been filled with joy. “So excited and just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. My mother’s song when she was waiting for me was ‘cuando, cuando, cuando – when when, when? When are you coming?’ I sang that song. I thought we were prepared,” she told NPR.
But during the delivery at the hospital, Ali said, her birth plan was immediately ignored and she was physically restrained. “It went from a small group of people in the room to many people in the room screaming, yelling at me,” she said. “I was held down by about four people.” She described chaos and aggressive and dismissive behavior by the doctor and nurses. “Faces, screaming, terror, panic. I needed somebody to help me,” she said.
Ali said her hospital records detail the doctor’s use of a high-risk emergency procedure that is rarely used. The Zavanelli maneuver is a last-resort procedure performed when a baby is stuck inside the birth canal. She said the maneuver was used even though her son had already been crowning, and that after the doctor pushed the infant back inside, she convulsed, the bed shook, and she lost consciousness. “After they pushed him inside me, and I remember roaring. I convulsed after that. Like my body – I can hear the bed just go buh-buh-buh-buh,” she said, describing the sound of the bed shaking. “And I was out.”
The doctor then performed an emergency cesarean section. Aszi spent several days in the neonatal intensive care unit; Ali said the hospital’s head urologist told her the infant was in shock from his traumatic birth.
Ali, who lives with her husband Vaughn Rasberry and their two sons, Alejandro and Aszi, says being a mother is the most important role of her life. She told NPR she came to realize, after hearing similar stories from other women of color, that her experience fit a pattern she identifies as systemic racism in maternal health care. “It wasn’t just me,” she said. “I was just one tiny drop in a very, very large bucket that has been overflowing for a very, very long time.”
Federal data show 649 women in the United States died of maternal causes in 2024, and Black mothers were more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Dr. Tamika Auguste, chair of women’s and infants’ services at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., told NPR the disparities are felt throughout the field. “I can’t tell you how many Black women have said to me: ‘Hey Doc, don’t let me die,’” Auguste said. “The poor rates in outcomes of Black maternity patients is something that rocked us to our core.”
Auguste said important work has been done in the maternal health care field to improve protocols and guidelines to address conditions such as cardiac issues, hemorrhaging and hypertension, which are more prevalent among Black women. Bias, however, remains a problem, she said. Auguste pointed to what she described as a dangerous misconception among some in medicine that Black patients have a higher threshold for pain. She said she believes it is key for medical teams to acknowledge that disparities exist and communicate intentionally about bias to prevent it from affecting patient care. “We are very purposeful in looking at outcomes with a lens of demographics of different racial breakdown of different types of data,” Auguste said. She said those discussions are moving the needle slightly, and her hospital in Washington, D.C., employs about a dozen midwives. The team pairs physicians with midwives, doulas, nurses and anesthesiologists in the same care setting: “Physician, midwife, doula, nurse, anesthesiologist, working together as a team. That is critical,” Auguste said.
Even as protocols change, access to maternity care is contracting. Auguste’s hospital recently closed one of two postpartum units, citing financial pressure. A JAMA study found that more than 500 hospitals closed maternity wards between 2010 and 2022. March of Dimes, a nonprofit that tracks maternal and infant health, reports that more than half of U.S. counties lack hospital-based labor and delivery services, which the organization calls “maternity care deserts.”
In the South, Black and Indigenous women are more likely than white women to live in areas without adequate access to maternity care providers, according to KFF Health News. People of color are also more likely to be uninsured. Nearly 40% of Southern counties are maternity care deserts, according to March of Dimes.
Ali told NPR that, through her own healing, she has found beautiful relationships and support in the Black and Indigenous maternal health community. She travels the country speaking at conferences and other events, sharing her personal story and talking about solutions.
Ali has built part of her response into a business, Baby Yams, which sells heritage baby quilts in vivid ankara and batik fabrics, each given a name meant to represent protection and strength. “They’re this storytelling machine of the possibility, the hope,” she said, describing the quilts. The company donates part of its proceeds to the Birth Future Foundation, which provides grants to midwives, doulas and student birth workers. “There are solutions. The solutions exist now,” Ali told NPR. “There are birth centers, there are midwives educating themselves, doulas going into practice.”
One recent recipient is Nadia Gramby, a 41-year-old midwife in Alabama who completed her licensing requirements — moving from practicing as a doula to a midwife — with a Birth Future Foundation scholarship funded by Ali. Gramby said her work helping families across Alabama is especially important because nearly 40% of counties in the South are maternity care deserts, according to March of Dimes. Her practice, she said, is an important option, especially for Black families that may not otherwise have immediate access to care. “It is an amazing joy to see families who feel safe and know that they’re seen, and they made decisions to make sure that their children are born in safe environments, where they feel comfortable, and they feel cared for and they have been educated and they are empowered,” Gramby told NPR.
Black midwives and doulas have had a rich history in African American life and communities for centuries. Midwives are medically trained to perform many of the same functions and procedures as doctors when women are having babies in low-risk situations; they deliver in hospitals alongside physicians, in birth centers and in homes, and they frequently collaborate with doulas, who provide non-medical support. Research shows midwife births lead to lower rates of complications.
A March of Dimes report released this year found midwives to be “critical and part of the solution to expanding access to maternity care, especially in rural and under-resourced communities,” and called on policymakers to remove state requirements for physician supervision and raise reimbursement rates from Medicaid and private insurance. Some physicians and policymakers have raised concerns about giving birth outside hospitals; midwives cannot perform surgery, for example, which can mean delays in getting emergency treatment, and some states have laws that restrict midwifery practice, the organization noted.
When Ali became pregnant with her second son, she said, she and Rasberry searched carefully for the right midwife. That time, she told NPR, her birth plan was honored. “We deserve to be cared for,” she said. “We deserve to have choices. We deserve to have control over our own bodies. We are beautiful. We are deserving of loving hands.”