Rebecca Polston, a midwife, watches Em’Mae Alexander labor with the support of her mother, Tulani Alexander and her doula, Lakesha Gordon at Roots Community Birth Center. Alice Proujansky/The Guardian
The photojournalist Alice Proujansky, an alum of the Department of Photography & Imaging, wrote a photo essay on Rebecca Polston, the only black-identified certified mid-wife in Minnesota and the Roots Community birth center, Minnesota’s only black-owned and operated facility of its kind. The article was published this week in The Guardian. An excerpt:
Mckinney-Wigley, a 23-year-old African American gas station employee 31 weeks pregnant with her first baby, never felt comfortable with the doctors she saw in early pregnancy. “It just seemed like they really didn’t care what was going on with me. I couldn’t hold anything down; I couldn’t eat. My mental health was waning.”
“They never asked me how are you. How are you doing? They’d be like ‘How’s the baby?’ First question Rebecca asked me is, ‘How are you feeling? How are you feeling about yourself?’ And that just showed me that she really cared about me as a person. Not only as a host body for the baby. My stress just totally went away. I was able to eat, I was able to hold food down.”
The stakes here are high: African American babies in Minnesota are twice as likely as white babies to die in their first year.