2/12/2021 Foundry Giving Friday: The Birth Sanctuary

• Posted on 12 February 2021
• Posted in Foundry Giving Friday
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Every Friday The Foundry Home Goods donates 5% of our total sales to a different community-nominated small-and-mighty cause. This Friday's Foundry Giving Friday recipient? The Birth Sanctuary!

If you are having a baby in the state of Alabama there are ZERO freestanding birth center options available. The Birth Sanctuary (in Gainesville, Alabama) wants to change that.

In addition to being the first (and only—for now!) freestanding birth center serving the entirety of Alabama, The Birth Sanctuary will also be only the twelfth black owned birthing center in the entire country. We talked about the life-giving value of home/birth center births—especially for communities of color—when we featured MPLS' own Metro Midwifery (the only black owned home birthing practice in the entire state of Minnesota) as a Giving Friday recipient back in September. In short:

In the United States, black birthing people are more like to die in childbirth, more likely to have pregnancy and birth related complications, more likely to suffer a loss of pregnancy, more likely to lose their baby within the first year of life, and more likely to have a preterm baby. There is no "scientific" reason for this, it is wholly because black birthing people experience racial health disparities in pregnancy care and childbirth. 

Community midwifery care, especially with a black provider, has been shown to defy these statistics. While we wait for large medical-industrial birth spaces to eliminate racial bias, make purposeful inclusion of gender-affirming care, become respectful of religious and personal freedom, and begin to follow the best evidence for low-risk labor and birth as the standard of care—families and individuals can receive comprehensive care at Birth Sanctuary Gainesville, being certain that their specific needs will not be overlooked.

The Birth Sanctuary is headed by (the truly amazing) Dr. Stephanie Mitchell—a doctoral prepared, board-certified nurse midwife with a comprehensive background serving a diverse birthing community for the last 13 years. If you'd like to learn more, follow along here @the.birth.sanctuary and here @doctor_midwife (we also highly recommend tuning in to her "Sunday Cervix" weekly women's weekend comedown.). It's Black History Month. Let's help Dr. Mitchell make some.

If you don't need anything from us, consider supporting The Birth Sanctuary Gainesville directly. Funds go directly to the building/outfitting of the physical birth center structure, as well as for the construction of comprehensive prenatal education programming. Any remaining funds will be used to directly finance Midwifery care for those who would otherwise be unable to utilize these critical services as well as supporting black or brown midwifery students via a Birth Sanctuary Scholarship.

If you DO find yourself in need of fresh brushes or bulk cleaning supplies, know that your purchase goes to support good change happening on the community level. Black Births Matter.

Thanks to Ravenel for the nomination!

If YOU have a worthy cause to nominate for our Foundry Giving Friday initiative, pop on over to our Nomination Page and drop us a line. We're all in this together.