The Delta Doula Revolution

Reclaiming Our Births, One Woman at a Time in Mississippi and the Greater South 

I was a newlywed in Winstonville, Miss., in 2014 — a place so small it rarely makes the map, unless your roots run deep in the Delta. That year, I experienced a miscarriage. A nurse-midwife at the Delta Health Clinic failed to recognize or diagnose it. I sat in the silence of uncertainty, Googling my symptoms in desperation, trying to make sense of the pain no one around me could name. The answers didn’t come from my provider. They didn’t come from my family. They came from my own relentless search for truth. 

What I didn’t know then was this heartbreak would become my awakening. My questions — about my body, about care, about survival — became a kind of compass. I wasn’t just asking how to birth a child. I was asking:

Will I survive this?

Who will stand beside me?

Why does no one talk about what happens to us,

Black women, when we give birth? 

That’s when the revolution began for me. 

What followed was a journey I never could’ve predicted. I gave birth to eight children across three states — through snowstorms, in deserts, and under the thick Southern heat. I trained with Black midwifery elders like Shafia Monroe and Toni Hill. I became a doula not just to support other women but to reclaim the parts of myself the system tried to steal. Along the way, I discovered what I now believe to be true: Doula training is not just about birth — it’s about power. 

Because in the Mississippi Delta, where birth often begins with fear and ends in trauma, doula training could change the entire story. The current narrative here is one of silence, of women walking into birth rooms unarmed with knowledge, unsupported by systems, and unseen by those in power. It’s a story in which hospitals restrict choices, where VBACs (vaginal birth after Cesarean section) are forbidden, where mothers are shamed for asking questions, and where the closest help is often counties away. 

Why Black are Black mothers more likely to die in childbirth? A leading OB-GYN says both health and societal factors are at play. image credit: Sirita Render

Imagine if that changed. What if Black women were trained, right here in the Delta, to know their bodies, ask the right questions, and offer care rooted in tradition and respect. What would happen if more doulas were born from the very soil where so many of our mothers have bled? If women knew how to protect their birth plans, how to resist unnecessary interventions, how to advocate for themselves and others? 

It wouldn’t just change birth outcomes. It would change lives. It would interrupt generational trauma. It would build community trust. It would dismantle the lie that Black women must be strong and silent to survive. 

That’s what this story is about. That’s what we’re doing. That’s the revolution. 

The Delta Deserves Better 

The Mississippi Delta is not just a region. It is an inheritance of blood, blues, cotton, and too many Black babies buried before their first birthdays. Here, maternal mortality rates for Black women remain among the highest in the country. In some towns, there is no hospital, no labor and delivery wing, no midwife within a hundred-mile radius. There are Black women preparing to push out babies in counties that have no OB-GYN, no doula, no hope, except the kind they conjure from their ancestors. 

We know this landscape well. 

Brittany Isler remembers it with pain in her bones. Her first baby was born at a Delta hospital where the doctor, in a moment that still makes her voice shake when she speaks of it, put his foot on the table and yanked her child from her womb. The result: a brachial plexus injury that paralyzed her daughter’s arm. The care afterward? Dismissals, delays, and finally, surgeries out of state. "I’m strong-willed," Isler says, "but the white coat silences you. I went mute in that room." 

It wasn't until Isler trained as a doula herself — through DONA and under community mentors — that she found her voice again. "Knowing your body was made to do this changes everything," she says. Her last birth? A VBAC in Jackson, Miss. Not because she wanted to travel, but because no hospital nearby would let her labor naturally after a cesarean. 

"We have to go to Memphis or Jackson for that," she says. "No one local allows VBACs." 

Let that sink in: To birth safely, Black women in the Delta must leave their own communities. 

We’re Not Crazy, We’re Capable 

Alyssa Longmire lives in Holcomb, Miss., now, but she and her husband — he’s Chickasaw, she’s Mexican — both grew up in California. Their family doesn’t quite fit the local boxes. “We’ve been lumped into a category we haven’t grown up in,” Longmire says. “People treat us like we’re white down here, but we weren’t raised with a white experience, so it's been interesting to be in this middle place that doesn't really exist.” 

Her first birth took place in North Carolina, during her time in the military. The hospital was a teaching site. “They gave me a big suite in exchange for letting 20 nursing students come in and watch. Intervention after intervention, no bedside manner,” she remembers. “It didn’t feel like care; it felt like I was being managed.” 

By the time Longmire was pregnant in Mississippi, the state’s maternal mortality stats terrified her. She didn’t want another clinical experiment — she wanted something sacred. She chose to birth at home. 

“Homebirth isn't a luxury. It was my resistance,” Longmire says. “My son saw the whole thing. I was on the bathroom floor. And when I came out with that baby in my arms, I wanted to tell everybody: ‘See? I wasn’t crazy. I was capable.’” 

But even with her preparation, access was the biggest barrier. Her midwife, Toni Hill, had to rush through winding Delta backroads to make it in time. “The cord was wrapped. Toni barely made it,” Longmire recalls. “My husband is amazing, but he wasn’t trained. If she hadn’t gotten there, he would’ve had to do it alone.” 

Even as an advocate, Longmire is careful about how and where she tells her story. “I don’t feel like it’s my place to speak in rooms where I don’t look like the women being harmed,” she says. “So instead, I share with the women who do. I pass the mic.” 

The Power of Training 

Chelesa Presley founded and runs the Delta Diaper Bank in Clarksdale, Miss. But long before she was handing out diapers and running breastfeeding classes, she was a 19-year-old girl in Columbus, giving birth naturally — not by choice, but because her Mormon doctor insisted. "You gone do this natural and you gone breastfeed," he told her. She didn’t feel empowered. She felt powerless. 

"I didn’t know anything," she says. "My baby didn’t eat for days. My family blamed me. They said my breast milk was nasty. Nobody knew about jaw alignment issues or pumping. Nobody knew enough to help." 

Presley went on to birth three children, become a Lamaze instructor, and eventually, train doulas alongside Toni Hill on the Diaper Bank's campus. She now teaches community-based doula trainings with Hill, hosting sleep-in intensives at the Delta Diaper Bank campus — grounds that once held a Catholic school and now birth a new generation of advocates. 

The women she trains now work in WIC, teen health programs, and birth education throughout Mississippi. One of her students? Brittany Isler. 

"This is your body. This is your experience. How do you want it to be?" she now asks her moms at the diaper bank. "Doula training doesn’t just prepare you to support others. It teaches you to support yourself." 

Rewriting the Narrative, One Birth at a Time 

Shana Lark, a stay-at-home mom now living in Grenada, Miss., cried when she found out she’d have to give birth in-state. In Arkansas, where her first child was born, there were few options. In Mississippi, there were even fewer. Shana’s education background helped her advocate, but the barriers were endless: outdated facilities, high C-section rates, billing surprises and dismissive providers. 

"The doctor asked, ‘Do you want to die? Hemorrhage and die?’ That’s the kind of fear they use to make you give up your plan," she says. 

Lark cobbled together online doula classes, support from Toni Hill, and a digital benefit called Cleo (a family care service her husband’s job provided). It helped, but most women she knows don’t have that kind of access. 

She dreams of a different Delta. One where doula access is normalized. One where no one is made to feel crazy for wanting a birth rooted in dignity. One where every Black mother knows she has choices. 

Birthing Back Our Power 

We are not statistics. We are storytellers, spirit-carriers, and system-changers. We are mothers, daughters, doulas, and disruptors. We are what the Delta has been waiting for. 

To the Black girl sitting on her porch in Winstonville, wondering if she’ll survive pregnancy: You will. We did. And we’re here. 

To every woman who’s ever been silenced in a white coat room, to every daughter who’s ever been told her pain wasn’t real, to every mama who didn’t know she had options: You do. We do. We’ve always had them. We just forgot. 

Let us remember. Let us re-member. 

And let us birth a new story. 

Together. 

Shayla Brown is a doula, mother of eight, founder of the Black Birth Story Blog, and creator of the documentary "What Did Our Mamas Do?" She writes from the Mississippi Delta and wherever Black women are birthing in power.