The Change Report™: Latham Thomas of Mama Glow

On the importance of access in regards to family planning, protection for persons who

Welcome to The Change Report™, an interview series exploring and explaining change from people who are making a difference in the world. This interview series is free but def consider supporting The Trend Report™ however you can, either by sharing this story or upgrading to a paid subscription 💚

I recently learned that my father has taken up an unlikely-to-normal-people pastime: camping out at abortion clinics, trying to sway people from entering. There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, it’s through a church which, I would assume, is likely not extending post-birth services and care for these people, ensure they have proper support for the children they will bring into the world. Second, he goes with a group of men all around the same age, a bunch of sexagenarians ostensibly “doing the right thing” but actively attempting to assert control over the bodies of people who can have children. Third, this isn’t something he’s doing with anyone else in my family, at least not willingly: this is something he is doing entirely on his own, his Falling Down cross to bear that serves as a reminder of why I have effectively gone no contact with him.

I say this because, in so many ways, politics can seem abstract and far away from us but something as big-and-small as bodily autonomy and the ability to procreate (Or not!) is a very active representation of how these issues are so present in our lives. You may not know it but you very well may have someone like my dad in your life. Well meaning, sure, but definitely acting on ideas in the worst ways possible, all in the name of “helping.” He is doing anything but helping. Imagine if that time was used to help create care for people with newborns, watching their kids for free, advocating for safe birthing experiences, ensuring that everyone has access to free healthcare, both before, after, and well beyond labor: why not help that way?

Thankfully, I know someone who is actively doing these things: Latham Thomas, a maternal health advocate who started Mama Glow, the Mama Glow Foundation, and The Soft Space in Brooklyn. She works to train doulas and help create safer, more positive birthing experiences for people, particularly Black women — who face the highest maternal mortality rate by a significant margin. This may sound dated or like a small problem but, as of 2022, Black women die at a rate that is equivalent to the deaths of white, Hispanic, and Asian women — combined: 49.5 deaths compared to 19, 16.9, and 13.2, respectively. This is a problem. Obviously! And something that Latham has been working to address for years, trying to close gaps in care while empowering local, national, and international communities to take action. She’s also shaping the future of maternal care by teaching at Brown University, bringing her expertise into a space where persons of various fields and backgrounds can better serve these communities. In short, she is doing the work.

To understand how Latham makes change — and in anticipation of Black Maternal Health Week in April — I spoke with Latham about how she’s prioritizing issues given the current state of politics, how the landscape of maternal care has changed in the last decade, and why anyone can become a doula.

KRF: It’s a very interesting time in America and the world. Working in the reproductive rights space for so long, what are you prioritizing as far as issues? There’s a lot of intersectionality to your work and I’m wondering if there are things that are jumping out as far as priorities. Where are you situated in that regard?

LT: I mean, everything’s important. What's happening is that there's so much distraction: there's so much coming at us, executive orders and actions that are designed to exhaust us from being functional, regardless of the administration.

A couple of things are being unraveled. When we look at the fetal personhood debate and what It means to grow families of all configurations — Thankfully, assisted reproductive technology makes it possible for people of all backgrounds to start families. — what’s being modeled is a cis, heterosexual, white couple with the picket fence and 2.5 children: this, to them, is under threat. What constitutes a family has shifted really positively when we think about LGBTQ families and how they have configured families, with values we can adopt and bring into how we think about configuring all families. It's expansive, not limited to a type of framework that gets centered or celebrated or rewarded. These really draconian laws and bans are making it challenging for people to exist. Just look at the list of all the banned words. White? Not banned. Man? Not banned. But every other word is banned. We have to ask ourselves: why is there such a focus on controlling people and the way that we move and live? As an organization at Mama Glow, we look at how people of marginalized identities are treated and how they are experiencing life as a temperature check of what we should be responding to. When we look at Black queer communities and disabled communities, they have always found ways to navigate spaces where they've been underserved, under-supported, and under-resourced. The moment that we're in calls for looking to those groups — looking to the people who have always been on the front lines, who have been movement building — to help us with the solutions to move forward.

There's a couple of things that we're centering. The larger lens of reproductive justice is a framework that looks at your right to have a child, your right not to have a child, the right to raise that child fully, into adulthood, in safety and security and community and belonging and in dignity, but also the right to bodily autonomy, right and body sovereignty: everybody needs that. That crosses everywhere along the reproductive health continuum regardless of where you sit in terms of gender or gender expression. The conversation we have been having is a fight for our existence, a fight to feel safe, for us to be recognized in our humanity and personhood in all spaces. The spaces that we are particularly looking at are within healthcare but it crosses everywhere because, if you really look at how most of our institutions are designed, they're carceral in nature — and so is everything we’re battling. These are forces that are essentially trying to keep us from getting free. Look at all the populations who are literally here, saying “They're trying to disappear us.” Look at what's happening to immigrants: if you start looking, you realize that pretty soon somebody's gonna come for you. Whatever is happening here is going to impact us all — it just depends on how and how deeply and in what ways. It will distort, reshape, and reconfigure your life. What can you do about that? What are you willing to do about that? That is the question.

KRF: That makes sense. One thing that resonates with me — that I feel like I haven't thought about fully and people, generally, may not connect even if it’s obvious — is the “you need to have a child” conversation as it relates to bodily autonomy, ableism, and all their intersections. Hearing someone like JD Vance talking about how we need to have more families, more kids, and all of these things as the ways to support families across the board, to the point of reproductive bodily autonomy, are being restricted. It’s upsetting and ironic that there are “population issues” but whether or not that is real is to be seen — but we know that he’s saying that certain types of populations are in crisis. It's a really flimsy cover for, you know, only certain people having access to families. It's easy to miss that, in some ways

The underlying subject here is intersectionality. I think that's something that will free or help us all progress: we know this — but it's easy to forget. Working in the reproductive rights space, especially for Black women and Black birthing persons in America, why is more inclusive access to reproductive rights and family building important for everyone? That’s something people may miss, that “Oh, this is just for one community.” when, no, this is actually helping everybody.

LT: I think a lot about disability justice as a framework because a lot of people understand this.

Before society really acknowledged folks with disabilities as humans, there was a lot of work that had to be done. A consideration was to develop curb cuts in the sidewalks. In any city in the United States, when you walk down the street, when you get to a corner, there's an automatic dip at the end of the corner at that piece of the sidewalk that is designed to allow anyone to come off that curb, into the street easily. If you're confined to a wheelchair or another mobility device and there is not a cut, you are confined and have a limited experience. You will need help, which complicates life. As far as civil engineering and construction and urban planning, it was seen as a nightmare and there was so much pushback but, with a lot of hard work and applying pressure, it was done. Guess who benefits? The person who's obviously bound to a mobility device but also the person pushing their stroller and the elderly person pushing their groceries and the baby on a tricycle, learning to ride a bike and the person who may be on crutches: everybody benefits everybody. It's designed for the person that's most marginalized but all experiences benefit.

When we think about the design for Black and brown women and birthing individuals and the impediments in place that impact their ability to thrive, these are race based and, in some ways, class based. There's a belief that Black women are impervious to pain, that you would ask for drugs but be met with the assumption that you must be addicted to drugs: your pain is not perceived as real. This goes back to enslavement. We have so many medical journals from the 1700s that are based on eugenic thought that dictate these differences — and these have been embedded into our medical system. This is at the crux of what medicine actually looks like, reproduces, and believes. When med students today go into spaces and prepare to become physicians, they're carrying this bias with them. At the root of it all is an invitation to think differently, to change and dismantle and reconstruct something that's going to benefit us all — and that's going to improve this experience tremendously for Black individuals. If we can get it right for the folks who are dying three to four times more than white women are, everybody's life improves. One thing people do not realize is that we're talking about maternal deaths in this country: for Black women, it's 49.5 lives per 100,000 live births. For white women, it's 19 per 100,000 live births. They're still dying too — but people think it's just Black women who are dying. Misogyny and misogynoir is alive and well and thriving in this country and is the reason why we do not make these improvements.

We can look at the research: dollars always trended toward cis, heterosexual, white males and their experience. When we study anything, we study it on their bodies. This has gone back for hundreds of years. In the 1500s, when medicine was nascent, the only people who could be studied were male bodies, male cadavers, which ties all the way back to the Garden of Eden. The idea of painful periods and painful childbirths is connected to this belief that the female body is a site of sin, an accident waiting to happen. This perpetuates the idea that you need to be controlled. There once was a time where they were burning us at the stake!

If that's how you're being seen, within the healthcare system, within our institutional spaces, you are received through a lens of bias. When we talk about the social determinants of health, the non-medical factors that impact our experience of health, housing, education, etc., it is your physical phenotype and how you are perceived in the world. It affects things like access to food and food security and access to things like healthcare: these are factors that are constantly under threat. To your point about JD Vance and this utopian point of view that he likes to present…where should these women go, when they want to have babies? There's always been this idea that we must protect the fetus — but then when the baby arrives…and they try to snatch away the benefits, snatch away education, snatch away housing. This body has to be a part of the capitalist project, which is really what is being said. Forcing people to have children but not thinking through what it means to have these laws in place literally mimics things like the Fugitive Slave Acts.

A lack of education — and slashing, like, 50% of jobs in the Department of Education — is heartbreaking too because we have so many people who are uneducated making life decisions that impact us all, even in the ballot box. We need people to have education and access to it. What they're trying to do is make sure a certain subset doesn't have it. Then, when they cut education for poor individuals and disabled folks, poor white folks are affected too, many who voted for these people. One of the reasons why we can't get a lot of work done is because people see it as a “Black issue” when it’s a human rights issue. We shouldn't be the highest income country, spending the most per capita on healthcare, and have the most people die during childbirth or due to childbirth related causes. One in four women go back to work ten days after having a child! Imagine having, like, a minor surgery — then your work is like “See you in a week.” We're talking about having a whole baby and then being sent back to work! The people who typically have to do this are frontline workers, folks who are underinsured or uninsured, all vulnerable. Many of these people are Black and brown, who are really vulnerable. Even though we are perceived as this “resilient” group of individuals, when you look at our healthcare outcomes, we're really delicate — and it's because we already start out weathered. We already start out impacted.

KRF: It’s all connected and, while a lot of people do understand the “idea” of these issues, I’m not sure they fully get it. A good example: I was watching a TikTok a few days ago, where there was a conversation between people talking about gender and work. One of them was a right wing commentator who was talking about how men do specific jobs, that some things are a man's job — and they die on the job. The other person, who was on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, was like, “No one should die on the job. No man or woman or anybody should die on the job. It’s not noble to die on the job: that’s a problem.”

That really highlights what we're talking about: nobody should die giving birth. That should not be happening in 2025! But here we are, with all the issues you mentioned. But it’s important to highlight how, ten or fifteen years ago, culture at large learned a lot of the language around these subjects related to reproductive health. For example: the idea of a doula. I feel like that was something that came into public focus in the late 2000s and early 2010s. People really started to think and talk about these issues more expansively — and more in pop culture. You had celebrities like Ricky Lake and The Business of Being Born all the way up to organizations like yours helping to deliver on-the-ground change.

How have things changed in the past fifteen or so years? For all the issues we have, I feel like there has been a lot of progress and change. How do you see change continuing? Particularly as a college professor, who interacts with so many different people who will shape the future of the industry.

LT: I definitely think that one of the powerful tools that helped was social media. That advanced conversation and kept people engaged in the comment sections, learning. In 2018, when we developed the Mama Glow doula immersion program — which was a live training program — and within nine months we expanded from New York to LA, Miami, and Paris. Then Covid hit and we were like, “What do we do? How do we bring the program online?” I didn’t even know how Zoom worked!

KRF: That was totally normal.

LT: It was — but we transferred everything online within three weeks! And were able to grow eightfold from that point. It allowed us to bring hundreds of student classes. It allowed us to really reach, obviously, way more people. We’ve trained 3,000 doulas and nurse care managers since 2018, which has been incredible.

Journalism has been really important too. ProPublica came out with a really powerful piece of reporting in 2017 as well as The New York Times, which looked at Black maternal health — and those pieces were viral and were so substantive but also critical lenses that took the subject global. That helped people spawn into action. It created a launch pad for other work to unfold, putting a spotlight on work that was already being done. I really think there was a confluence of factors that helped advance the work, catapulting us forward. 2020 was also a pivotal time: people were in isolation for Covid which meant we saw a lot of maternal deaths in that time because people were unscreened. They were under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed. They were getting virtual care instead of in-person care — and people were falling through the cracks. We had a lot of really challenging moments during that time and I remember doing a piece for Cosmo — and it was their highest performing piece that month because of what was happening in the moment around maternal health.

More people of the internet and digital generation are now having children. Gen X and Gen Y were talking into an abyss, in analog, but now people who are native to technology have all the information in their phone, at their fingertips. It's a different time! That’s been a win in many ways in that it's helped people find organizations and fund properly. We also did a partnership with L'Oreal and Carol's Daughter, which is in its fifth year. Since it launched, we were able to reach 5.1 billion people through our digital advocacy efforts. That allowed for the expansion of this conversation: it wasn't just us doing the work — but we became a driving forces in messaging and helping people to access the information necessary to speak about it. I feel grateful for that because having the skills to be able to package these things and create programs and design ways to get the information out there that's snackable and accessible is how we make sure that this information falls on people's hearts so they take action.

There’s an awakening now to the issues and to the landscape — and folks are finding their way in. Whether through policy or public health, people now want to be doula trained. We have everyone from policy makers to legislators taking the course. We have people who are mph, we have PhDs, we have doctors, we have midwives. Obviously we have people who are going to be birth workers — but we have folks who are in the media who need to understand this subject fully, taking our courses. We also design courses for medical centers and within academia. To be able to teach the course at Brown University, which is the first in the Ivy League? That would have been impossible twenty years ago. It's only been possible now because of a moment we're living in, where students are also saying, “We're not getting what we need. We need to have access to information that centers marginalized people along the birthing continuum, so when we get into bioethics and medical anthropology and OBGYN, public health, pre-med, people are not at a disadvantage.” This moment has allowed for that energy to surface, where it feels like we’re laying brick-by-brick, beating a drum. Because of technology, how else would you know about this? You could live in Brooklyn and not know we’re down the street, at our center. Now we have these tools. It’s been the perfect storm, in a way.

KRF: I think we take technologies like social media — which have obviously flaws — but we take some of the advances for granted. It’s difficult when you're in the day-to-day of posts, which disappear as fast as they come, making it easy to forget news and culture happens. But progress is being made.

I think a good example, which I realized as we were talking, is that I could probably count on one hand the amount of people I know who have gone into reproductive work, to become a doula or a midwife because of these discussions. Ten, fifteen years ago? I would not know of anyone. Literally a friend from college just started a program and was just like, “Yeah, I'm going back to school after 20 years for this because this is a passion of mine.” That's incredible! That is a testament to your work in the community.

LT: Social media is a powerful tool, but a cruel master. You have to find ways to use it — but you cannot be a slave to it. Find the right tools that work for you.

KRF: It can absolutely work, especially for sharing information. So, for anyone reading this who wants to know how to get involved or who wants to make change in their community — locally, nationally, internationally — in regards to reproductive rights, birthing rights, and beyond, what would your advice be?

LT: Number one: survey the area you live in and find out: What are the local birthing centers? Are there local midwives? Are there doula collectives nearby? A lot of these spaces operate with not-a-lot-of-funds. Being to donate to the community or towards a birth or to a friend who might get pregnant is big. Instead of just buying a bunch of onesies, maybe you could also pitch in to pay for doula services or do research for a friend? Where can they get services for free? Or find someone who offers services on a sliding scale? There's always a pathway to doula service. No one should be without a doula, regardless of income.

Contact your local electeds to see what initiatives are rooted in internal health, especially if you live in an area that has poor maternal health outcomes and or if you're in a maternity desert. We have the Black Maternal Health Caucus and The Momnibus Act too, which has been presented on the floor of Congress with pieces passed. There are 13 pieces of legislation — and it's awesome. Learn what they're working on, reach out, and send letters about it to your senators .

One of the amazing things we have as a gift from the Black community and the queer community is kinship, to find community in siblings and friendships, all to form family. One thing you can do is be the connective tissue in the birth village. Get doula trained, if you feel called — and be the person your birth village can contect, to help people expand their families. This is so important because we need people of all backgrounds in this work, people of marginalized identities who can share lived experiences. We need Black and trans and First Nations doulas: we need all types of people.

There's a role for all of us based our skills and passions: lend that to the movement. You don’t have to be outside, picketing, or even on the front lines of a birth — but there is a role for you in this movement. Your energy is needed.

For more on Latham, make sure to follow her on Instagram and explore more from Mama Glow on their website. Subscribe to The Trend Report™ for more stories on change today.