How to Teach Empowerment to Pregnant Moms

Lately it feels to me like empowerment is the “new black.”

You know, it’s fashionable to be seeking empowerment. Everybody’s craving their “Eat, Pray, Love” moment when they can finally take a deep breathe and be who they truly are (and always were).

As a community organizer for a decade when empowerment wasn’t so sexy I’m thrilled to see it making a comeback.

What does this mean for people working with pregnant women? It’s time to get thee some empowerment tools!… READ MORE

The Healing Activist

One of my favorite professors at Barnard was my Political Theory Professor, Professor Dennis Dalton.  HE WAS AMAZING!!!  He would teach in the first person, becoming Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Hitler, whomever he was teaching, to convey their thoughts and perspectives as best he knew how.  I actually got chicken skin and started crying as I sat in on his Gandhi lecture.  How often does that happen in a college class???
 
As a Gandhi scholar, he focused much of his passion on the power and brilliance of the non-violent movements.  … READ MORE

creating big change requires big action

Last week I told the BOLD Birth Facilitators about a big BOLD dream I’ve had for a while. My activist heart was jumping up and down. I’ve been feeling this one in every cell of my body.

When I’m ready to push you will be the first to know.

I’ve been an activist since, I don’t know, probably birth. There was always an issue I was taking on, napkins I would scribble ideas on, bedtime stories I’d tell myself of how people can make a difference in the world.… READ MORE

A BOLD Birth Business Journey: The Herstory

It was January 2010. I wanted to do something BIG to make change in my birth community. I had just performed in The Vagina Monologues and I kept thinking I wish there was a play like this about Birth Issues! So…I Googled it.  That is how this journey begins.

Fast forward 10 months later, I have Produced, Directed, and performed as LISA, in Karen Brody’s amazing play “Birth” It’s 2 am on opening night, I’m sitting in my living room across from Karen Brody feeling like I might be sick to my stomach.… READ MORE

The First Cesarean

In this excerpt from Cut, Stapled, & Mended: When One Woman Reclaimed Her Body and Gave Birth on Her Own Terms After Cesarean, Roanna brings us into the operating room, intimately sharing the cesarean delivery of her first child.

Now that it’s been decided, the uniforms leave, giving me the peace and quiet I had been craving. Ben cries. I do not. I am empty, wrung dry. Continuing contractions mock me. I want it over. I want the pain to go away.… READ MORE