Culturally specific maternal health care for Black and Indigenous women key to reducing harm for birther and child

Octavia Treadway’s middle son was a drummer before he was born. “He actually started drumming in the womb,” said Treadway, the co-executive director of You’re Carrying Someone Great , a nonprofit that, once launched this summer, will focus on the prenatal and postnatal health of Black and brown parents and children. “We would be at church and the choir would start to sing and play, and he would just be going crazy. It was just his thing … he was born, he came out and as soon as he could pick something up, he literally just started banging it.” Treadway is a mother of three sons, but she didn’t always feel supported during and after her pregnancies. During her first pregnancy, Treadway said she “pretended to be sick” in order to stay for two extra days, since she felt she didn’t have the ability or the education, as a teenage mother, to support her son. Octavia Treadway Later, during her pregnancy with her third son, Treadway was told to “calm down” by a doctor, and responded by “stepp(ing) out of character” to tell the doctor that asking her to “calm down” was “completely unreasonable.” ADVERTISEMENT “I can talk right now...