“They judge you; they judged Christ. Godspeed for women’s rights,” Kendrick Lamar chanted at the end of his Glastonbury Festival performance in 2022. It was just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping away the constitutional protection for abortion amid the country’s maternal mortality crisis—the highest of any developed nation—and the global coronavirus pandemic.
With faux blood dripping from his head, adorned with a diamond-encrusted crown of thorns, à la Jesus Christ, the protest was a cry for reproductive justice.
The Compton rapper’s prayers were already being answered not too far from his hometown.
Board-certified midwives and cofounders Kim Durdin and Allegra Hill launched Kindred Space LA, a birth support center in 2018. The center’s launch was in response to the Black maternity health crisis affecting Black birthing people, who are three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy or birth-related complication. The maternal mortality crisis refers to the death of a birthing parent during pregnancy or up to a year postpartum. According to the World Health Organization, including midwifery in family planning could help avert more than 80 percent of all maternal deaths, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths.
Without the necessary funds, the duo humbly operated out of a rented office suite where they created a community space for pregnant and postpartum people. They provided resources, connected pregnant people with doulas, and gave education and training for aspiring doulas, midwives, childbirth educators, and lactation consultants. In 2020 their GoFundMe raised $50,000, allowing the Kindred Space LA Birthing Center to open its doors.
The Kindred Space LA is radical reproductive justice. Radical, defined by activist and Black Panther Party member Angela Davis, is “grasping from the root.” Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework, coined in 1994 by combining reproductive rights and social justice. By 1997, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, or the SisterSong, was founded by 16 women-of-color-led organizations representing African American, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latinx, and Indigenous women. The framework of the organization was based on three tenets of reproductive justice: the right to have a child; the right to not have a child, using safe birth control, abortion, or abstinence; and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments.
Despite not accepting insurance due to the low payments from insurance companies to Kindred, the birthing center continues to combat the inadequacies of the mainstream healthcare system with its recent partnership with Needed, an expert in women’s perinatal nutrition. Access to Needed’s Nutritional Care service, which is free of charge, creates a more equitable healthcare system for Black birthing parents, who are twice as likely as white birthing parents to give birth with little to no prenatal care.
Needed was cofounded by trained nutritionists Julie Sawaya and Ryan Woodbury while they were navigating their own fertility and nutrition journeys. Needed and Kindred fully educate their clients about prenatal nutrition information. “Perinatal nutrition is vital for a healthy pregnancy and baby,” Sawaya tells BUST. “This information, however, is not widely understood, dispersed, or accepted.” The average prenatal care appointment in the U.S. is just seven minutes long, which simply isn’t enough time to adequately cover nutrition beyond “take a prenatal vitamin.” A visit between a patient and a midwife at Kindred Space LA lasts a full hour.
“Our partnership with Needed has been really amazing because our clients have access to a whole nutritional profile that is based on their individual physiology,” Durdin tells BUST via email. “It’s been so eye-opening for so many of our clients and it bolsters the work that we’ve already done at Kindred Space LA to provide excellent nutrition counseling.”
Kindred Space LA is revolutionizing the birth industry by reclaiming Black birthing traditions one birth at a time.
ImAGES COURTESY OF KINDRED SPACE LA
