Health Education Media
This section features health education media designed to increase your understanding of your personal birthing experience or expand your Maternal Child Health knowledge. Through videos, visuals, and interactive content, you can explore key health topics, learn what to expect in care settings, and access tools that support informed decisions and self-advocacy.
Spiritual Midwifery
This classic book on home birth is now in its fourth edition, with updated information on the safety of natural childbirth, new birthing stories, and the most recent statistics on births managed by The Farm Midwives. Ina May Gaskin also provides new information about potentially dangerous techniques routinely used in hospitals during and after birth, as well as the latest findings about VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean). Improved instructions for handling breech births are also given.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown is a book that argues for pleasure as a political tool for liberation, challenging the idea that activism must be dour and difficult. Drawing from Black feminist theory, it blends essays, interviews, and art to explore how pleasure, sensuality, and self-care are radical acts against oppression, connecting personal well-being to social change in areas like race, gender, and climate justice. The book encourages readers to find joy and abundance as a way to build a more just world, featuring voices from Black, queer, and trans communities.
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America
Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Dorothy Roberts analyzes the reproductive rights of black women in the United States throughout history.This book details a history of reproductive oppression that spans from the commodification of enslaved women's fertility to forced sterilizations of African American and Latina women in the 20th century. Through these accounts, Roberts makes the case that reproductive justice is a necessary part of the greater struggle for racial equality.
Sacred Pampering Principles: An African-American Woman's Guide to Self-Care and Inner Renewal
With her holistic approach to filling your life with comfort, balance, and peace, Debrena Jackson Gandy debunks society's myth that doing something for yourself is decadent and selfish. In fact, she says, the joy we gain from treating ourselves--whether to a luxuriant bath or to a meditative hour alone--is transferred to the people in our lives. When we emerge rejuvenated, others benefit from a patient mother, a fulfilled wife, an effective coworker, a solidly grounded friend.
The Good Mother Myth: Redefining Motherhood to Fit Reality
A 2013 essay collection edited by Avital Norman Nathman that challenges the idealized, often unattainable image of the "perfect mother" prevalent in media and social networks. Through honest, raw stories from diverse mothers, the book explores the realities, struggles, and imperfections of motherhood, aiming to create a more realistic and supportive narrative that moves beyond guilt and competition.
Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag
Written and illustrated by A.K. Summers, and based on her own pregnancy, Pregnant Butch strives to depict this increasingly common, but still underrepresented experience of queer pregnancy with humor and complexityfrom the question of whether suspenders count as legitimate maternity wear to the strains created by different views of pregnancy within a couple and finally to a culturally critical and compassionate interrogation of gender in pregnancy.
What to Read
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and use a human rights analysis to show how the discussion around reproductive justice differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion debates that have long dominated the headlines and mainstream political conflict. Arguing that reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate, for example, the complex web of structural obstacles a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas faces as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. In a period in which women’s reproductive lives are imperiled, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women’s human rights in the twenty-first century.
Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society
Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions.
Helpful Apps
Skin Deep
A mobile tool that helps users check the safety of personal care products (cosmetics, cleaners, etc.) by scanning barcodes or searching ingredients for potential health hazards like carcinogens or allergens, assigning easy-to-understand scores.
Pregnancy Companion
A comprehensive weekly tracking, 3D visualizations, health monitoring, and personalized expert advice. These apps provide essential tools like contraction timers, kick counters, and nutritional guidance to support expectant parents throughout their journey.
Irth App
The only app where you can find prenatal, birthing, postpartum and pediatric reviews of care from other Black and brown women. The #1 “Yelp-like” platform for the pregnancy and new motherhood journey, made by and for people of color. Search doctor and hospital reviews from your community!
Feed Baby
Suitable breastfeeding logger and baby tracker for new parents to care for babies aged 0 to 5.
MommyMeds
Mom's can scan the barcodes(Updated Weekly) of thousands of over the counter medications and receive immediate, clear, and easy to understand information on the drugs safety, and the safety of any ingredient the drug contains.
Full Term
This is the simplest-to-use contraction timer. The app will help to track your contractions and determine when it's time to go to the hospital. If you plan on having a home birth, the app will help determine what stage of labor you are in at any given moment.
Have a Recommendation?
Is there a book, video, or app that has helped you on your pregnancy or educational journey? Let us know so we can share with our communiy!