content warning: medical abuse, anti-Black violence, miscarriage In this time of simultaneous quarantine and racial reckoning, Quatia Osorio—a Providence-based doula—has persisted in providing her birth services to pregnant Black women. Doulas are trained, non-medical professionals who provide emotional and physical support as well as informational guidance to soon-to-be and recent parents. They don’t require a standardized license to practice, but they typically undergo workshops led by other doulas to gain certification from organizations such as DONA International. As a perinatal doula, Osorio works with families across the full spectrum of pregnancy. This ranges from crafting a birthing plan to laboring and postpartum care (aiding new parents on diapering, breastfeeding, the mother’s recovery, and more) to potential bereavement support (if the mother or infant is lost during birth or in a miscarriage). In mission and methodology, doulas operate differently from both obstetricians—physicians who deliver babies and provide surgical interventions in hospital settings—and midwives—health professionals who help deliver babies in homes, birthing centers, and hospitals. However, some doulas, like Osorio, have their sights set on eventually switching from doula work to certified midwifery. Osorio’s dream is to open her own birthing center. Where hospitals have been critiqued for the over-medicalization of childbirth through unnecessary interventions like C-sections, doulas respond by emphasizing the desires and comfort of the parents. They soothe mothers who are in physical pain while ensuring they have sufficient information about the risks and benefits of each proposed medical decision in the delivery room. Like midwives, doulas provide their services in multiple settings; though as Osorio mentioned during our conversation, low-income families often cannot afford both a home birth and a doula. Osorio is the founder of Our Journ3i, an organization that has provided doula training and services to Black women in the Providence area since 2015. She is also a founding member of the Umoja Nia Collective, a group of doulas who identify as descendants of the African diaspora and focus their services on those “most impacted by environmental and social determinants of health.” Osorio intentionally works with Black communities as a direct response to the underlying public health crisis killing Black mothers and infants. The risk of pregnancy-related death for Black women is three to four times greater than that of white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Similarly, according to Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, the rate of Black infant mortality in the state was 12.2 deaths per 1,000 live births from 2013 to 2017, whereas the rate of white infant mortality was 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births. This crisis, as described by Osorio, has its roots in the very origins of the practice of gynecology: the brutal mutilation of enslaved Black women at the hands of 19th-century medical “researchers” who were often slave owners themselves. Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens has noted that these white medical professionals of the time viewed Black women as “intellectually inferior to white women, but also physically stronger” and as capable of withstanding more pain. These racialized medical views bleed directly into modern physicians’ life-threatening neglect to take Black women’s concerns seriously, including during childbirth. “That is the community I serve, that’s the community I represent,” said Osorio. “That does not mean I don’t serve all families and all communities. But this is the space that I feel has the highest need for help. Black families have the loudest call and they are ignored the most.” In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Osorio discussed her continued efforts to pass House Bill 7587, which would establish insurance coverage and reimbursement for perinatal doula services in Rhode Island, how medical students can be actively anti-racist in the Providence hospital system, and the “long suffering” of being a Black woman who fights to preserve the right to life for other Black women The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
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New Life in Crisis A conversation with Quatia Osorio: doula, entrepreneur, mother BY Vicky Phan ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil
06 NOV 2020
