They’re hoping to reduce the maternal and infant mortality rates in the Black community!
Brad Edwards is the founder of “Dads to Doulas,” a program he created after he experienced an unimaginable loss, Black Enterprise reports. In 2017, Edwards was an expectant father of twin boys, but complications in the pregnancy resulted in both of the babies being stillborn, a tragedy that took Edwards a long time to process.
“I held any of the emotions I had from my experience for years, and it took one day, sitting in my basement with my friends watching football, to start having a conversation about it. I started sobbing, and I couldn’t control my emotions. I just held everything in,” Edwards recalled.
While Edwards navigated the guilt he felt and tried to be a strong support for his partner, a new purpose was emerging. The pain fueled him, and Edwards began creating programs for men to support them with mental health and educate them about pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care. In 2020, he partnered with “Dear Fathers,” a St. Louis-based platform that amplifies stories of Black fatherhood, to expand his mental health work to those struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With [the COVID-19 pandemic], we saw there were going to be a lot more deficiencies in the Black and brown communities, and we also noticed that mental health was being talked about more than ever within the Black community,” explained Edwards.
The program launched on his daughter Carielle’s birthday, May 18, 2020, and over the last four years, it has grown into a safe community space for Black men. This past summer, Edwards looked to expound on the program’s success, launching Dads to Doulas, a free six-week program that helps empower Black men with the tools they need to support the birthing process.
“Through my experience losing my twins, I realized that there was a lot I didn’t know, and there was a lot that I didn’t take the time to educate myself on. So by the time another opportunity came, when I was preparing to have my baby girl, I had become familiar with what a doula is,” Edwards told reporters.
Reaching out to his longtime friend, Kyra Betts, who was already a doula, Edwards was able to educate himself, create a strong birthing plan that included ways he could help, and that proved critical during the birth of his daughter, from being knowledgeable about his partner’s preeclampsia diagnosis to being able to care for his daughter on his own while she received treatment. Now, Edwards and Betts facilitate the six-week program to help other Black fathers do the same in the hopes of combatting the high maternal and infant mortality rate in the Black community, Black women dying during childbirth at three times the rate of their white counterparts and Black infants dying at twice the rate.
“Dads to Doulas aims to equip Black men and expectant fathers with the knowledge and skills to advocate for their families from pregnancy through infancy. By providing doula-level education, we strive to reduce maternal and infant mortality rates…[We] recognize the profound impact this can have on our community and [strive] to empower our families from the very start,” a statement on the website reads.
The program builds a community around Black fathers, providing in-person and virtual programming to help the men engage fully in the birthing process. The six-week course covers the history of birth and basic birthing knowledge, what to know about home birthing, birth centers, and hospital births, pharmacological pain management education, partner advocacy education, birth plan creation, and even a safety crash course regarding infant care. Edwards says that his program can help men become motivated to be more engaged in the birthing process and create healthier families and communities as a whole.
“I would love for us to be a real game-changer as it relates to health care and making sure that these families don’t ever have to suffer any of the same loss I did, if it can be avoided. I want people to understand that our shared experience should be shared. Every time I share my story with some brothers, that’s therapeutic for me. I don’t want us to be so tight-knit with our experiences that we’re not able to use that to empower not only ourselves but also someone else who needed to hear them,” said Edwards.
To learn more about the Dad to Doulas program, click HERE.
Cover photo: ‘Dads to Doulas’ Program Is Empowering Black Men With Tools to Support the Birthing Process/Photo credit: Michael Thomas/Greater t. Louis, Inc./STL Mag