A note to our readers: please be advised that this article entails potentially activating content regarding pregnancy loss and maternal mortality, as well as content addressing Black racialized trauma.
This fall, the Center for Women’s Leadership (CWL) at Portland State University launched its Engaged Scholarship initiative, a new program that will connect and create learning pods of faculty, students, and community members around consequential and mutually beneficial projects.
“CWL is excited to bring together teams of collaborating faculty and students to advance the aims of projects of critical importance to the communities at their center,” said Vicki Reitenauer, CWL Faculty Co-Director and Engaged Scholarship director. “Supporting projects that are already underway allows CWL to offer a catalytic energy to the work and provides collaborators with the resources they need to achieve their projects' goals by their own design and on their own terms.”
The first project in the Engaged Scholarship series is Push: Black Mamas Changing the Culture of Birth, a theatrical piece by Roberta Suzette Hunte, assistant professor in the PSU School of Social Work, showcasing the inequities of Black perinatal care in Oregon.
It would be difficult to find a more fraught time in America’s history of reproductive justice and maternal care than the present. For Hunte, an affiliate faculty member in Black Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, storytelling is the medicine people need most at a time like this.
“In a country as divided as ours, telling each other our stories is a critical part of bridge building,” she explained.
Storytelling as Medicine
As a conflict and peace studies researcher, Hunte recognized the power of storytelling as a cultural change agent early on in her career. Translating her research into stage plays and other performing arts pieces has helped more people access and connect with her work, which aims to uplift the stories of people of color, as well as those of the trans and non-binary communities.
The dramatic arts hold a special sort of catalytic potential for the social change Hunte hopes to inspire.
“Theater is my church,” she said. “It invites people to feel. It’s a subconscious experience. They’re not thinking about it; they’re feeling and processing at a human level.”
Hunte believes empathy building is ultimately what’s possible for audiences of the performing arts, something that can feel harder to achieve through a scholarly paper or data-heavy report.
Building on her previous theatrical work in the reproductive justice space, Hunte is meeting the moment with plans to bring Push to the stage in spring 2025 with collaborators Bobby Bermea and Jamie Rea of Beirut Wedding World Theatre Project. Push portrays the stark realities of Black perinatal care in Oregon and uplifts those who are working for change. The piece will showcase storytelling and expertise from a community of Black birthing people and birth workers including doulas, midwives, community health workers, researchers and home visitors.
The Story Behind Push
Roberta Hunte
For Hunte, the failings of Black perinatal care aren’t mere abstraction. Ten years ago, she suffered the loss of her daughter, Isadora, due to stillbirth and medical negligence. She knows intimately how Black mothers are often failed by Oregon’s maternal health care system.
“The personal is political,” she said. Losing her daughter was what moved her to start asking more questions about the quality of maternal care. “It was that experience that helped me understand that what happened to me happens to a lot of Black people.”
For Black mothers, the facts on the ground are dire. According to one study, Black mothers face a 2.2-fold increased rate of stillbirth. They’re also 3-4 times more likely to die a pregnancy-related death compared to white women. Additionally, the infant mortality rate within the first year of life for Black infants was double that of white, Asian and Hispanic babies, according to a 2017 CDC report. But lawmakers across the country seem determined to politicize the already troubled conversation around improving America’s maternal care.
“A third of pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth. So many people can say ‘That was my experience,’ and yet we have legislators at the national level trying to argue that this is the person’s fault and that medical intervention should be illegal,” said Hunte.
Hunte went on to have two more children with the resources and quality of care that she believes could save more Black women and children.
“I know the importance of a strong relationship with your medical team. I know what respectful medical care looks like and should be like,” she said. “I also know what having a doula can mean and a nurse home visitor and community health worker coming to your home, working with you and having them look like you.”
Given the widening political divides around maternal care and reproductive justice, the peace-building and educational agenda underwriting Push could not come at a more crucial time. Spring audiences will surely come away from the production moved, informed, and, Hunte hopes, empowered to demand change.
Push-ing the Oregon Legislature: The “Momnibus” Bill
A coalition of Black perinatal care advocates is mobilizing with Hunte at the helm. Rep. Lisa Reynolds, D-Washington County, the Children’s Institute, and Hunte’s Black Futures for Perinatal Health, an organization born out of her early reproductive justice work, will gather community stakeholders for an advocacy day at the Oregon Legislature in spring 2025. Their goal: To get an Oregon “Momnibus” bill passed so that Black mothers have the resources they need to experience healthier birth outcomes. Their package of policy recommendations will focus on comprehensive doula coverage, expanded substance use treatment, mental health care, postpartum care, and housing and economic support for people who have just given birth through the first year.
An Oregon “Momnibus” bill would put forward necessarily ambitious goals for Black mothers, but Oregon, home to the Reproductive Health Equity Act and the Oregon Family and Medical Leave Act, is one of the safest states in America to be a birthing person, according to Hunte. Still, despite its demonstrated leadership in maternal care policy in the U.S., Hunte argues that Oregon can and should do more. The hope is to pass more comprehensive legislation and create a model for the rest of the country of the possibilities for improving Black perinatal care. True to form, her approach to garnering support for such a policy package will entail the strategic use of storytelling.
“I’m just thinking a lot about the women in the South who died because of a failure of medical intervention around miscarriage,” she said. “We have to interrupt that. We interrupt that by telling our stories.”
The Push production team plans to build a collection of video-submitted birth stories for the piece, as well as assemble birthers and birth workers to give live testimony in Salem in support of the Oregon Momnibus.
“I think for a lot of folks, they have stories they need and want to tell, about what it means to be a birthing person, to be a Black birthing person, a rural birthing person, to be an Indigenous birthing person,” Hunte said. “I want people to understand that those stories are significant. They cannot be hidden.”
I think for a lot of folks they have stories they need and want to tell, about what it means to be a birthing person, to be a Black birthing person, a rural birthing person, to be an Indigenous birthing person. I want people to understand that those stories are significant. They cannot be hidden.
PSU Student Interns Sought
The Push collaborative welcomes the involvement of PSU students in its 2025 efforts. As CWL’s inaugural Engaged Scholarship project, the production will be partnering with the center in December to recruit communications, legislative and stage management interns.
“The Engaged Scholarship projects model community engagement that is authentic, responsive, reciprocal and accountable to the communities out of which they arise,” said CWL Co-Director Reitenauer. “Dr. Hunte's multifaceted project powerfully reflects the values and aspirations of CWL as a force for connection, creativity, and mutually beneficial leadership formation across difference and, as such, is a perfect place for the Engaged Scholarship initiative to start.”
Push’s message serves as a reminder of our potential in a social and political landscape that is ready for less partisan vitriol and more humanity and connection. Dr. Hunte and her passion for gathering stories into cultural medicine might be just what Oregon needs.
For more information regarding Push internship opportunities, please review CWL’s website and email questions to cwlinfo@pdx.edu.