Jamarah Amani, LM is a community midwife dedicated to birth justice. She created the Black Midwives Model of Care, the Birth Justice Bill of Rights, founded Black Midwives Day, co-founded the National Black Midwives Alliance, and is a founding member of the Queer and Transgender Midwives Alliance. As Executive Director of Southern Birth Justice Network, which includes the Mobile Midwife Clinic and Miami Birth Justice Initiative, she offers free midwifery care, facilitates accessible doula support, and advocates for birth justice in hospitals. An Echoing Ida alumna, Jamarah has written op-eds for the Miami Times and Miami Herald, and has appeared in Essence and the Washington Post. She speaks internationally about Birth Justice, including briefings for US Congress and the United Nations. She produced a documentary, “Legacy Power Voice: Movements in Black Midwifery,” and served as an advisor on MTV’s short film “Water Angel.” Her awards include the 2019 TrailBlazer Award from the City of Miami, the 2022 Umm Salaamah Sondra Abdullah-Zaimah Birth Worker Award, and the 2024 Woman of Vision Award. She is currently a Black Maternal Health Fellow with Chicago Beyond.
Keisha L. Goode, PhD is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Public Health at SUNY Old Westbury. She most identifies as a Black midwifery enthusiast! Her scholarship examines the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth with a focus on Black midwifery. Goode earned her doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her 2014 dissertation, Birthing, Blackness, and the Body: Black Midwives and Experiential Continuities of Institutional Racism, is recognized as a foundational study of contemporary Black midwives in the United States. Her book, Birthing, Blackness and the Body: Black Midwives and the Pursuit of Justice, is under contract with Columbia University Press. She served as the first public member of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives from 2015-2024, is currently serving on the inaugural board of the National Black Midwives Alliance and is on the advisory council for the Queer and Trans Midwives Alliance.
Leseliey Welch, MIPH, MBA is a public health strategist, social entrepreneur, writer, and professional dreamer whose guiding value is Love. As a founder of Birth Detroit and Birth Center Equity, her work is grounded in making communities stronger, healthier, and more free – starting with ensuring all people have access to all safe birth options. Birth Detroit opened its first freestanding community birth center in the fall of 2024. Birth Center Equity is a national effort to invest in Black, Indigenous, people of color-led birth centers at scale to make midwifery care a real option in all communities. She has twodecades of leadership experience in city, state, and national health organizations, including having served as Deputy Director of Public Health for the City of Detroit. Leseliey is the vision behind National Birth Center Week and the collective impact initiative Beloved Birth 50 by 50. She is also a poet and an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow.
We hold deep gratitude for the larger ecosystem of midwives, birthworkers, organizers, families, and communities whose wisdom, labor, and love sustain the birth justice movement. This work is not the effort of any single project or organization—it is part of a living, interdependent web of contributions that make survival, healing, and transformation possible.
With the publication of the Birth Justice Black Papers, we honor the ancestors, traditions, and contemporary leaders whose critical contributions continue to shape a broader community of care and justice. We especially thank Nina Ahmadi, Mikah Amani-Majeed, Tahera Christy, Laura Hughes, Cassandra Kelly, Brittany King, Amanda Lawson, Julie Quiroz, Sadie Saddiq, and Anjali Sardeshmukh for lending their hearts, talents, expertise and gifted hands to this labor of love.
Midwifery care is holistic, healing, and humanistic. It has a rich herstory and legacy in communities of color.
2024 Birth Justice Network. All Rights Reserved
