‘Full pandemic mama’ becomes full spectrum doula

Allysa Singer was, as she describes, a “full pandemic mama.” Singer became pregnant with her first child in the winter of 2019. As she became aware of the threats and the consequences of COVID-19, she started researching her options and her rights in the delivery room she’d find herself in August 2020.

What started as personal preparation– How many support people would she be allowed? Would she be allowed a support person at all? What restrictions would she encounter? How could she advocate for herself? What were her options?–  propelled her into a world of birth support and autonomy advocacy.

“I was just dumbfounded by the disparities that exist in maternal health,” Singer begins.

In 2020, Alabama, where Singer and her family live, had the third-highest Maternal Mortality Rate in the nation, at 36.4 per 100,000 live births.

BIPOC families suffer from massive disparities in maternal and infant deaths. In a recent piece, Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds, Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is quoted: “It’s not race, it’s racism…The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”

Still, unlike so many of her peers, Singer reports having had an amazing birth experience.

Inundated by birth horror stories, she decided to change care at 27 weeks in hopes that she would be better supported in her choices at a different institution.

Here, she was allowed a doula and support person to accompany her during her birth.

“Not a lot of women had that luxury,” Singer comments.

Knowing well that birth support is a right and not a luxury, she started her own doula practice in December 2021. 

Singer shares that she experienced severe postpartum depression, but she was able to divert and ultimately reshape this energy into her doula work.

“My doula training was the lifeboat that saved me from drowning in my PPD,” she says.

And now her practice, Faith to Fruition, has become the lifeboat for many of the birthing people Singer supports.

She shares: “I don’t believe that a birther’s desire to have more children should be dictated by their birthing experience. I have heard so many stories from people who had one kid but say, ‘I would never do this again because my experience was so traumatic.’ One of my biggest missions and goals is to support birthers to feel empowered in their process; not as bystanders of their process.”

Singer also holds a full time position as an industrial psychologist where she channels her advocacy work, pushing for organizational change and understanding of proper maternal support.

In fact, as part of a public speaking course for a training curriculum, Singer presented on why it’s important to support breastfeeding. She reports that her audience of roughly 25 was engaged, especially as she pointed out the absurdities of infant feeding culture in our country: How would you feel if I asked you to eat your meal in the bathroom? How would you like to eat with a blanket tossed over your head? for instance.

Singer also points out the “insanely amazing public health outcomes” breastfeeding affords.

If 90 percent of U.S. babies were exclusively breastfed for six months, the United States would save $13 billion per year and prevent an excess 911 deaths, nearly all of which would be in infants ($10.5 billion and 741 deaths at 80% compliance). [Bartick, Reinhold, 2010]

“Not only is there a personal investment, there is a public investment and value to understanding the larger implications,” Singer comments. “As a taxpayer, [breastfeeding] impacts you; as someone who utilizes our healthcare system, [breastfeeding] impacts you.”

With the recent passing of the PUMP Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act coming soon, Singer says “We still have a long way to go.”

Organizational policy doesn’t support motherhood; instead it fuels detached parenting which goes against nature, Singer goes on.

“Mothers feel the brunt of that more than ever,” she says.  “[We aren’t] supported to be able to care for our children the way that we want to.”

Singer says she sees it as her mission as an organizational psychologist to encourage change that supports parenthood, so that women don’t feel threatened to care for their children the way that they want to. This means ensuring that women are provided with ample space to pump their milk while away from their babies and empowering them to approach HR when there aren’t appropriate accommodations.

“Outside forces shouldn’t be able to dictate how you care for and feed your child. The end of one’s breastfeeding journey should be a personal decision.”

She continues, “It’s amazing that legislation is catching up. The thing that I fear with any law, there are still people behind those laws that have to enforce them and carry them out. Education and garnishing an understanding of what this looks like is a key component to implementation. The people behind those policies have to make them successful, but this is  moving things into a very good direction, and I hope that more changes to legislation follow suit, especially with paid parental leave. It’s a catalyst for change; I am hopeful but cautiously optimistic.”

Singer says she owes her personal success continuing to breastfeed her two-and-a-half year old to Chocolate Milk Mommies, where she now serves as a board member.

Through Chocolate Milk Mommies, Singer started a subcommittee to focus on education for individuals within the breastfeeder’s support system.

“The people in the village need to be supportive. When you don’t know better, you can’t do better,” she explains.

Singer recently completed the Lactation Counselor Training Course (LCTC) as part of Chocolate Milk Mommies’ mission to best support their constituents and as a way to benefit her doula clients with more well-rounded support.

“I really loved the training because I already thought that our bodies are amazing, but learning more science was great. I would text my friends the ‘Boobie Fact of the Day’,” Singer shares. “[The science] allows me to really appreciate my journey that much more and how impactful I’m being with my daughter.”

You can follow Singer’s work here and here.

Breastfeeding is not binary.

–This post is part of our 10-year anniversary series “Breastfeeding is…” When we initially curated this series, we planned for 10 weeks, but breastfeeding is so many things that we just couldn’t fit it all in.  Thus, two bonus weeks in our anniversary series! — 

Breastfeeding is not binary.

There’s solid evidence that direct breastfeeding offers the most protective and beneficial effects to mothers, babies and ultimately society.

Photo by Luiza Braun on Unsplash

When breastfeeding, a baby’s saliva transfers chemicals to their mother’s body that causes her milk to adjust to meet the changing needs of the baby. [Al-Shehri, et al 2015]

Even more fascinating, the combination of baby saliva and fresh breastmilk generates enough hydrogen peroxide to inhibit growth of Staphylococcus and Salmonella. Read about the science behind it all here.

Breastfeeding encourages proper mouth and jaw development and promotes oral health. 

When babies breastfeed, they are less likely to become obese for reasons like self-regulation of milk intake and seeding of their gut microbiomes. [Pérez-Escamilla, 2016] 

Infants at the breast, compared to bottle-fed infants, have better heart and respiratory rates and higher oxygen saturation rates because breastfeeding consumes less energy.

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

Breastfeeding has implications on mother-infant bonding and children’s future behavior. One study found that “compared to children whose mothers breastfed them, children who were not breastfed showed an increased number of internalizing behavioral problems, particularly anxious/depressed and somatic symptoms… A duration effect (dosage effect) appeared such that breastfeeding for 10 months or longer had the strongest impact on reducing anxious/depressed and somatic symptoms in children.”

Direct breastfeeding does not require feeding paraphernalia that may be vectors for disease. 

Even if the contents of a bottle contain human milk, the effects achieved through direct breastfeeding may not be possible.  

However, the reality of families’ lives, and sometimes choice, mean that most babies in the U.S. will not exclusively breastfeed or go on to breastfeed in conjunction with appropriate complementary feeding as recommended.

Photo by Lucas Margoni on Unsplash

The most recent CDC Breastfeeding Report Card acknowledges, “Numerous barriers to breastfeeding remain, and disparities persist in breastfeeding duration and exclusivity rates by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Policy, systems, and environmental changes that address breastfeeding barriers, such as better maternity care practices, paid leave policies, and supportive ECE centers, can help to improve breastfeeding rates and reduce disparities.” 

For these reasons and others, infant feeding often takes many forms. Infant feeding in America is not either/or, it’s both/and

Fiona Jardine and Aiden Farrow present experiences that do not fit into how we often generalize the infant feeding experience. 

Universal pumping icon by Fiona Jardine

Jardine’s work follows those who exclusively pump human milk. Farrow too pumped milk for their child born with cleft complications and then went on to directly chestfeed their baby.

Farrow has explained: “Feeding methods are not mutually exclusive. There are always windows and doors.” 

Lactation care providers, other care providers, health policies and procedures must all acknowledge the incredibly diverse experiences of families while honoring the very ubiquitous human desire that we all want what’s best for our babies.   

___

Our 10-year anniversary giveaway has ended. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Wives co-breastfeed son for two-and-a-half years

The lactation care provider glanced at her breasts and claimed, “You’re not going to be able to produce much milk.” Glenis Decuir, CBS, a young mother at the time, had just given birth to her first baby (now 17 years old), and while she intended to breastfeed her daughter, without explanation, without proper consultation and counseling, without a shred of compassion, the lactation consultant disparaged her intentions so tragically that Decuir not only did not breastfeed her daughter, she remained discouraged through the birth of her second child (now 14 years old) and did not breastfeed him either.

Decuir eventually learned that she has Insufficient Glandular Tissue (IGT) disorder.

“I knew my breasts looked different, but my mom’s looked the same as mine; I didn’t think anything was abnormal,” Decuir explains. “ I was young and wasn’t resourceful; no one explained anything.”

Though Decuir’s introduction to infant feeding was shrouded in the unknown and total neglect from care providers, her story takes a turn, epitomizing self-determination, advocacy and education, perseverance, resilience and empowerment.

In 2018, Decuir’s wife became pregnant with their third child. Because she would not grow and birth this baby, Decuir wondered how she would form a bond with him.

“It was very difficult for me to wrap my head around that,” Decuir shares.

Plunging into self-guided research, Decuir landed on the potential to induce lactation.

When she decided to embark on this path, Decuir reached out for guidance, but found herself in a void.

“Unfortunately, I received the most pushback from doctors, many of whom didn’t even know that inducing lactation was possible,” Decuir documents her road to co-breastfeeding. “I had to see four different doctors before I could find one willing to work with me. Being under the doctor’s care was very important because I had never done this before, and I knew I would be taking medications. After exploring several options, we chose the Newman Goldfarb Protocol as our method of induced lactation.”

For well over 20 weeks, Decuir delved into the protocol.

“Because I had really poor experiences with my first two and poor experiences with seeking help with breastfeeding professionals… I became an advocate… I had overcome so much adversity,” Decuir begins.

Laws state that we can pump anywhere, Decuir continues. And that’s what she did.

“I was pumping in every location imaginable! At my desk, in the car, the movie theater, Six Flags, and much more!” she writes.

Decuir goes on, “I decided to be very public about my entire journey on Instagram. One, I have the right to and I exercise every right, but it also opened a gateway to educating others.”

Prior to inducing lactation, Decuir reports that her children had never been exposed to anyone breastfeeding, “not even at a playground or anything,” she elucidates.

“This is how behind closed doors moms are with breastfeeding,” she says.

But Decuir and her wife’s approach is different; they are open-books with their children, she explains.

“They were old enough to understand scientifically, biologically, physically what my body was going to go through,” Decuir starts. “I educated them through a scientific standpoint, but also talked about normalizing breastfeeding. We talked about my daughter breastfeeding in the future, and my son and his role as a man in a household and how he can support his future wife to breastfeed.”

Decuir recalls the emotional and practical support her older children offered: “I cried in front of them, I pumped in front of them, I laughed in front of them; they helped wash bottles and Spectra parts…”

In sharing her journey with others though, Decuir wasn’t always met with such maturity and acceptance.

“I got everything under the sun,” Decuir remembers. Some told her it was disgusting, some found it weird, and some even went as far as to claim it child abuse.

Orion was born on September 2, 2018. At the time of his birth, Decuir was producing 16 ounces a day– quite close to what is considered full production– and had stored over 1,000 of her milk in a deep freezer.

Decuir says that she didn’t set forth focusing on the quantity though. “I wasn’t thinking about achieving full supply; I was thinking about producing anything. Even if it was only five ounces a day, I thought, I can at least do one feeding a day and that to me was worth it on its own.”

She continues: “Every time that I would latch Orion on, I just thanked Mother Nature and how amazing our bodies are. Maybe if I had birthed Orion, if I  had just latched him on, it wouldn’t have been a second thought, but because of what I went through–I worked real, real hard– every time I was able to latch my son, I literally thanked the universe. I was so grateful.”

Decuir and her wife went on to co-breastfeed Orion until he was two-and-a-half.

Throughout her breastfeeding relationship, Decuir remained visible in her efforts. “Having the power to go through that experience breastfeeding anywhere and everywhere in public, it became almost liberating and very freeing to be able to exercise my right, and in doing so I came across a lot of people. I took them as opportunities to talk more about breastfeeding and breastfeeding in public.”

At the start of her journey, in order to create her village, Decuir started a private Facebook support group. Today it has over two and a half thousand members.

Locally, Decuir serves as a breastfeeding support person through ZipMilk and is a ROSE Community Transformer, all on a volunteer basis. She has presented at the ROSE Summit in years’ past and is currently working on a book.

You can read Decuir’s former publications about her co-breastfeeding journey at https://aeroflowbreastpumps.com/blog/the-road-to-co-breastfeeding

https://www.baby-chick.com/what-is-co-breastfeeding/ and

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/co-breastfeeding_n_5c13eaf8e4b049efa75213e6.

Physicians as parents: How can one pour from an empty cup?

A medical student once told Nikki Lee, RN, BSN, MS, Mother of 2, IBCLC,RLC, CCE, CIMI, CST (cert.appl.), ANLC, RYT500  about an obstetrician who loved to pump while she was catching babies because she collected more milk than usual. Lee theorizes that perhaps it was due to the high levels of oxytocin in the atmosphere during childbirth. 

It’s a fascinating concept, and quite unusual considering physicians often find themselves in a terrible paradox. As Lee puts it, they are supposed to take care of everybody else, and no one takes care of them. They’re expected to be experts on everything;  as childbirth educators and lactation care providers, we often disclaim “this information is not meant as a substitute for medical advice.”

In this two-part series, Lee and I set out to explore the forces that surround infant feeding, ones that physicians must muscle through as parents themselves and as professionals. We explore emerging themes inspired by the article Medical training taught this Philadelphia doctor about breast feeding. But the real lessons came from her twins. In Part One, we offer thoughts on physicians functioning as parents themselves. Part Two covers physicians as professionals trying to support breastfeeding most often with inadequate education and training.

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee

With insufficient support in their personal infant feeding goals, physicians’ struggles sometimes seem to spur advocacy and a “do-better-for-my patients” attitude. Just the same, these experiences can lead individuals to harbor resentment, despair, resignation and defeat, and might unintentionally influence the breastfeeding support they are able to offer their patients. 

When physicians’ basic needs aren’t met, we can’t expect them to meet the needs of their patients. How can one pour from an empty cup?  Kathleen Kendall Tackett offers Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Self Care for Members of the Perinatal Team which presents insights on the effects of little institutional support and specific strategies for integrating self-care into care for others. 

Self-care is sustainable only when everyone can do it. 

Before physicians are done with their decade or more of training, they are challenged by inadequate support in their efforts to feed their own children. 

“In a survey of 412 medical trainees with children, more than 80% of women reported feeling stressed about breastfeeding, and one-third did not meet their breastfeeding goal,” Gaelen Dwyer points out in Pumping up support: Making breastfeeding easier for med students

What’s more, a  recent research letter, American Board of Medical Specialties Board Examination Lactation Accommodation, evaluates the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) member boards’ lactation-specific board examination accommodation policies highlighting that a minority of female physicians (42%) achieve the recommendation that infants receive mother’s milk at least until age one. 

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee

“Board examinations are a key aspect of medical training,” the authors begin. “With up to 22% of female trainees delivering a child during postgraduate training, and nearly 59, 000 female physicians in residency and fellowship in the US, there is a large group potentially affected by board examination lactation accommodations.”

About a decade ago, ​​in a landmark case that has implications for all testing organizations in Massachusetts, a unanimous Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that breastfeeding mothers are entitled to special accommodations to allow them sufficient time to pump milk during lengthy testing for medical licensure. [https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/04/13/breastfeeding-doctor-ruling ] 

The elephant in the room is the issue of parental leave. Honestly, it’s hard to stomach that we are still arguing that there are medical and psychosocial benefits of protected parental leave for both parents and children. The U.S. is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member country—and one of only six countries in the world—without a national paid parental leave policy. The U.S. is also one of the few high-income countries without a national family caregiving or medical leave policy. [https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/paid-family-leave-across-oecd-countries/

Women don’t breastfeed; societies do. The societal burden on the mother is magnified when the mother is a physician and is compelled to take care of everyone else, with no support for their own breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is blamed for being difficult, instead of us all getting furious that we don’t have paid maternity leave.

In the current U.S. healthcare system, physicians find themselves paid in Relative Value Units (RVUs), which bluntly put, is a pretty mechanical way to value providing care to other humans. In short, the more RVUs a physician racks up, the more they’re paid. Often that leaves lactating physicians forgoing pumping to spend more time with patients. The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act would close the loopholes that force physicians to choose income or feeding their babies. The PUMP Act advanced out of the Senate HELP Committee with unanimous bipartisan support in May 2021 and then passed with significant bipartisan support (267-149) in the House last October. Despite this strong bipartisan support, the bill has languished in the Senate for almost a year. Get updates on progress here

In February 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement on Parental Leave for Residents and Pediatric Training Programs.

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee

The policy reports that the Institutional Requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education require training programs to provide written policies regarding leaves of absence, including parental leave, and these policies must comply with current legislation such as the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but that the length of leave has considerable variability among residency programs. The statement outlines the challenges of parental leave policies in training programs and gives recommendations to protect trainees and their families. One challenge is that education calendars are set long before a person enters a medical program, but labor, delivery, and the establishment of breastfeeding don’t fit into a predetermined calendar. 

Despite this dismal landscape, the medical world is changing and there are stories and models to celebrate. 

Catherine Wagner, a cardiothoracic surgery resident at Michigan Medicine, managed to breastfeed and pump for a year during her residency with a network of support. 

A committee at the University of Michigan is calling on pediatricians to support their fellow physicians.  Pediatricians Advocating Breastfeeding: Let’s Start with Supporting our Fellow Pediatricians First describes the efforts to support lactation within the department. The committee collected university policies, state and federal laws, identified the needs of breastfeeding mothers and then created a policy to support lactating individuals as well as a handout to help supervisors and colleagues support lactating women in the healthcare setting. (Supplemental material; available at www.jpeds.com).

Got Milk? Design and Implementation of a Lactation Support Program for Surgeons describes an initiative where “Multiple faculty members offered to offload resident workload before starting cases to provide time for a lactating resident to express milk… The University of Wisconsin adopted a ‘cross-cover’ model encouraging lactating residents to have other residents assist in the operating room during non-critical portions of the case if the primary operating resident needed to express milk that has been very well received and easily implemented.”

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee

There’s attention being paid to lactation accommodation information in urology residency programs too. 

In this study, “Of 145 urology residency programs, 72.4% included information about lactation accommodations anywhere on the institution’s website.” The authors conclude that “efforts to recruit and retain female urologists should include making [lactation accommodation]  information more easily accessible.”

Authors Annery G Garcia-Marcinkiewicz and Sarah S Titler call on  anesthesiology as a workforce and specialty, to support the unique need of lactating and breastfeeding anesthesiologists in Lactation and Anesthesiology

This study offers the first comprehensive scoping review of the literature on breastfeeding policies pertaining to surgical residents in Canada.

The authors write: “…We aim to use these data to advocate for breast feeding for surgical resident physicians through the creation and improvement of current breastfeeding policies as applicable. This work aims to help change surgical culture to be more inclusive, which is vital in creating a breast feeding-friendly environment. This would include leadership endorsement of the policy, a culture shift (for example, no repercussions to resident for coming back on a modified schedule or taking breaks for expressing milk), visible educational notices throughout the workplace (ie, ‘breast feeding-friendly workplace’ notices, common in Canadian public settings), and creation of a network of ‘new moms’ within the surgical resident programme to ensure there is support and mentorship for new moms returning back to work. ”

While we wait for policies to catch up to the needs of lactating physicians, wearable pumps are helping them reach their infant feeding goals.  The Impact of Wearable Breast Pumps on Physicians’ Breastfeeding Experience and Success found that “those who had used a wearable pump reported statistically significant shorter lactation breaks (p < 0.00001) and were more likely to be able to provide breast milk to their infants for their entire intended duration (p = 0.005) compared to the traditional pump group.” 

The support network Dr. MILK (Mothers Interested in Lactation Knowledge) has been successful at helping physicians mothers reach their infant feeding goals. 

Where else are you seeing physician parents being supported in their infant feeding journeys? Email us at info@ourmilkyway.org

Empathy in architecture

A friend of mine works in a healthcare building; her office, windowless. Stark white walls frame the shiny tiled floors in the also windowless laboratory that surrounds her office. Rectangular fluorescent lighting looms eerily overhead. Working in this space for the majority of her waking hours amounts to constant longing for sunshine and an overall agitated demeanor. I imagine the architect of this space wasn’t much of an empath.

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

This effect is being documented in a growing body of research demonstrating how color, texture and patterns affect human emotions.

Generally, humans are quite robot-like, performing our daily duties without a great deal of attention paid to the building structures, layouts or designs that we move through. 

“When we don’t notice the built environment, it’s silently affirming our right to be there, our value to society. When we do, too often it is because it’s telling us we don’t belong. Those messages can be so subtle that we don’t recognize them for what they are,” Kim Tingley writes, later quoting architect Joel Sanders: “‘We sleepwalk our way through the world…Unless a building interior is strikingly different or lavish or unusual, we are unaware of it.’” 

The first time I saw a lactation pod at an airport– unusual at the time– I had mixed emotions. Part of me became excited that this was an option for traveling, lactating, pumping, and breastfeeding people, but most of me scoffed, annoyed, thinking something along the lines of: “Of course breastfeeding moms would be given this messaging to go hide themselves away from the public eye.” 

What Tingley wrote, that our built environment affirms our right to be in a space, affirms our value to society, is certainly a powerful concept. 

The COVID pandemic has forced us to think more about the built spaces we move through, adding layers to this idea of how and what and who we value.  

In a recent episode of Uniquely Milwaukee Salam Fatayer of 88Nine Radio Milwaukee poses the question: “What could our city, neighborhoods and community spaces look like if they were created based on people’s emotional, psychological and social needs?”

Photo by Coasted Media on Unsplash

Local architects and scholars answer with ideas about how they’re supporting the users of the spaces they create, with the goal of making sure people feel safe, at peace and nurtured by those built environments. 

On Our Milky Way, we’ve had the honor of highlighting the work of those thinking about how built spaces affect birth, lactation and beyond. 

For example, in conjunction with the Institute of Patient-Centered Design, Inc., The MomFriendly Network created The Lactation Design program which consists of research and outreach projects to enable the Institute to contribute design resources that  improve accommodations to support breastfeeding. Read more about this project here: https://www.ourmilkyway.org/physical-environment-influences-breastfeeding-outcomes/ 

Renée Flacking and her colleagues’ work, Closeness and separation in neonatal intensive care, explores how architecture influences outcomes in neonatal units. Single-family room designs are increasingly replacing traditional open-bay units for reasons documented in their paper.

Source: United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC)

“This architectural structure provides the family with an opportunity to be with their child in the neonatal intensive care unit day and night providing facilities for parents’ basic needs including the need for privacy. This design has been suggested to be associated with a lower rate of hospital-acquired infections, similar to single patient rooms in adult intensive care (48), earlier full enteral nutrition, higher breastfeeding rates and a more soothing environment with, for example, lower ambient sound levels (49). As this design has been shown to reduce the length of stay in hospital significantly, for example, by 10 days in preterm infant below 30 weeks of gestation in a Swedish study (50), it shortens the time of separation for the infant from the home and family. Parents have reported that they felt that a single family room design in a NICU facilitated their presence with their infant (51), but the increase in parent–infant closeness gained by a single family room model during hospital care is not well documented in scientific literature.”

Read Our Milky Way’s coverage on this concept here

In stark contrast, attorney Leah Margulies recently shared in Protecting Breastfeeding in the United States: Time for Action on The Code that formula companies provide architectural designs to maternity care facilities in a deliberate attempt to separate dyads, making bonding and breastfeeding difficult and consequently,  families more likely to become reliant on their artificial products. It’s a sickening example of how the industry saturates our systems, down to the skeletons of our buildings.

Photo credit: Henrico County Public Library

Venturing beyond the very early postpartum period, it’s exciting to explore how community spaces are supporting young families. The Henrico County Public Library – Fairfield Area Library is accommodating families with their Computer Work + Play Stations which were conceptualized by library staff and materialized by architects at Quinn Evans and TMC Furniture staff. Read more about that inspiration and process here

Supporting lactation and breastfeeding in the workplace is a vital part of ensuring that lactating individuals feel valued. Setting up lactation spaces sometimes calls for innovation and creativity. You can explore our collection of stories about workplace accommodations in the stories below: 

CLC advances breastfeeding protection and support in the workplace

Workplace supports breastfeeding mother of triplets

Making Breastfeeding the Norm through The Breastfeeding Family-Friendly Community Designation (BFCD)

Alameda sergeant improves lactation space and support in county

Artist celebrates working mothers with ‘Liquid Gold’ project

Worksite program caters to nursing moms

Photo credit: Meredith W. Gonçalves

 

Pulling back the lens further, the architecture of communities themselves influences well-being too. One of the effects of redlining is poor health outcomes. Part of this equation involves the placement of industrial buildings and factories. Vann R. Newkirk II points out in Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real that The National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that BIPOC are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. “Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty,” he writes.  

NICHQ hosts a webinar The Residual Impact of Historical Structural Inequities: Connecting Residential Segregation and Mortgage Discrimination to Current Infant Mortality and Breastfeeding Rates where maternal child health experts including speakers Jaye Clement, MPH, MPP, Brittney Francis, MPH, Kiddada Green, MAT, Arthur James, MD and Jessica Roach, LPN, BA, MPH share examples for supporting efforts to reduce infant mortality and improve maternal and infant health. 

Circling back to Tingley’s piece, the article raises the concern that although we’re equipped with knowledge about how under-resourced populations are being affected by current structures and practices,  “funding earmarked for expanding inclusivity [may] be diverted toward making existing facilities safer for those they already privilege.” 

Drawing on Sanders’ work, Tingley writes,  “Throughout history… the built environment has reflected and reinforced inequality by physically separating one group from another, often in the presumed interests of health or safety. Women-only bathrooms, so designated by men, supposedly preserved their innocence and chastity; white-only bathrooms separated their users from supposedly less ‘clean’ black people. It’s no coincidence that Covid-19 has disproportionately sickened and killed members of demographic groups — people who are black, Indigenous and Latino; who are homeless; who are immigrants — that have been targets of systemic segregation that increased their vulnerability. It’s also not hard to imagine the pandemic, and a person’s relative risk of infection, being used to justify new versions of these discriminatory practices.”

Art by Liz Richter, Photo by Leslie Rodriguez
Find more of Richter’s art here: https://www.lizrichterart.com/public-art

In this vein, Glenn Gamboa details where some funding gets funneled in a piece published this spring. 

“Twelve national environmental grant makers awarded $1.34 billion to organizations in the Gulf and Midwest regions in 2016 and 2017, according to a 2020 study by The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center. But only about 1% of it — roughly $18 million — was awarded to groups that are dedicated to environmental justice.” 

The climate crisis is an accelerating threat that is both affected by and affects architecture. 

“Architecture has to mediate between the perceived needs of the moment versus the unknowable needs of the future; between the immediate needs of our bodies and the desire to create something that will outlast generations,” Tingley goes on to write. 

Across the globe, architects push to be “mindful of their projects’ environmental impacts and resilience, including an emphasis on upcycling, the use of solar power, better building practices, and, of course, structural longevity,” Alyssa Giacobbe writes.  [More on ecological design here.] 

Alongside resilience and sustainability, there must be a focus on design that specifically serves mothers and their children. Mothers are too often left out, unseen, underserved despite there being about two billion of us worldwide, with an increasing likelihood of women becoming mothers

Photo by Dimitry Anikin on Unsplash

Lisa Wong Macabasco puts it this way: “Although the experience of human reproduction touches all of us at least once in our lives, its effects remain taboo, under-researched and excluded from exhibitions and publications covering architecture and design history and practice. In these spheres, maternity is treated furtively or as unimportant, even as it defines the everyday experiences of many – some 6 million Americans are pregnant at any given time.” 

It isn’t surprising that “design for children, design for healthy spaces, design for those with disabilities, care of and for their colleagues – these discussions and follow through are happening largely through female-led firms and initiatives,”  Julia Gamolina comments in The Unspoken Burden on Women in Architecture

In an exciting development, Wong Macabasco describes design historians Amber Winick and Michelle Millar Fisher’s Designing Motherhood, “a first-of-its-kind exploration of the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design. Their endeavor encompasses a book, a series of exhibitions and public programs in Philadelphia, and a design curriculum taught at the University of Pennsylvania.” 

This is exciting, and it’s progress. But as Wong Macabasco quotes Juliana Rowen Barton– architecture and design historian and curator who also helped organize Designing Motherhood– “Progress is not the fact that this show happened – progress is these conversations continuing to happen.” 

Designing Motherhood is on view at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia through this month of May 2022.