Georgia Birth Advocacy Coalition

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Georgia, my home state, is the most dangerous place in the country to give birth. Thousands of Georgians suffer abuse, trauma, and permanent disabilities each year because of obstetric violence and a collapsing maternity care system. It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2016, I founded the Georgia Birth Advocacy Coalition. My organization advocates for the legal rights of pregnant people, and educates families about strategies for protecting and asserting those rights.

I’ve watched friends and acquaintances face abuse and mistreatment in hospitals across the country. As a society, we still have trouble acknowledging that people who give birth retain the right to bodily autonomy. Witness, for example, that we continue to perform episiotomy, a type of genital mutilation, on birthing women. Doctors routinely do this without consent, and occasionally over the protests of the woman—in spite of evidence that this procedure is almost never necessary.

So when I got pregnant with my first child, I had a clear plan, and chose a provider whom I believed would respect my body. Yet when I was 38 weeks pregnant, I got news that the hospital where I planned to give birth was removing numerous birth options, and might establish policies coercing women into medically unnecessary procedures.

I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I kept waiting for someone to do something. No one did. The mainstream feminist and reproductive rights movements have largely ignored the rights of birthing people.

So I quit sleeping. I started a letter-writing campaign and planned a protest. My husband, drafted a lawsuit. The hospital responded to that threat by saying it would honor my birth plan—but not everyone else’s. That wasn’t good enough. Everyone deserves a safe, trauma-free birth on their own terms, not just people with power, time, or access to a lawyer. So I continued my campaign, with the support of hundreds of other Georgia women. We eventually secured a meeting with hospital leadership, and convinced them to reverse most of their policy changes.

Yet women kept contacting me about horror stories at other hospitals—the woman coerced into a C-section her doctor thought was unnecessary; the woman given an episiotomy without her knowledge that left her with serious pelvic floor injuries; the woman denied an epidural for “talking back” to her doctor. It was endless. I decided to channel the skills I learned through my initial fight into something bigger. The Georgia Birth Advocacy Coalition was born.

In 2019, when I was pregnant with my second child, I became one of the tens of thousands of women who, each year, nearly die giving birth. My baby died when I was 24 weeks pregnant, and I suffered a postpartum hemorrhage. I waited in an emergency room for care for hours, while a male nurse prioritized a man whose finger hurt. I am white, affluent, educated, and an exceptional advocate. My lawyer husband was with me when this happened. Too often, we assume that if the woman did something different—if she advocated more effectively or demanded better care—things would go differently. That’s victim-blaming. It’s sexist, wrong, and ignores the very real power disparities women face seeking maternity care. Since this experience, I’ve redoubled my efforts to ensure that no woman ever again is left to bleed to death without care.

Most people who don’t have a lot of exposure to pregnancy and childbirth are shocked at the terrible treatment birthing families experience. Georgia has a higher maternal mortality rate than 100 other countries. It is shameful, but I believe we can change things in our lifetime.

If you want to keep up with the fight for better maternal health in Georgia and across the globe, follow the Georgia Birth Advocacy Coalition Facebook page. Or visit the Georgia Birth Advocacy Coalition website.

You can learn more about the fight for birthing families in Georgia by reading these posts: