What is Maternal Justice?

Maternal Justics is affordable, timely, high-quality, equitable, and dignified care during and after pregnancy is essential for all birthing people. Maternal justice is a model of culturally sensitive care that aims to dismantle inequities in maternity care and maximize maternal health and well-being. It rests on human rights and requires us to chip away at racism entrenched in health systems.

How does the NPTF address Maternal Justice?

While the persistence of maternal and infant health disparities in the United States may seem disheartening, there are many communities who understand the profound importance of addressing this issue and who are doing pivotal work in this area. Examples such as The JJ Way® provide evidence that positively changing these outcomes is indeed possible. Frameworks such as the Maternal Justice Model also provide a blueprint and a track record for self-determined communities and allied organizations and institutions to truly go “upstream” to organize and push towards the elimination of ALL inequities, health or otherwise.

The NPTF is one example of the work that it takes to establish key networks to support this important endeavor, allowing groups to work together and maintain a clear historic and analytic frame guiding their work toward shared goals: that every pregnant woman/person experience a positive and healthy pregnancy and birth, and that maternal and infant health outcomes are improved overall.

Excerpt from:

The National Perinatal Task Force -Building a Movement to Birth a More Just and Loving World

Haile Eshe Cole, Paula X. Rojas, and Jennie Joseph

Read More About Advancing maternal justice on both sides of the Atlantic Here

The Maternal Justice Model (MJM)

As a result of 25 years of community-based organizing and a decade of birth justice work,  community organizer and midwife, developed the Maternal Justice Model of care.

This model, currently being implemented by Mama Sana/Vibrant Woman in Austin, TX, is interdisciplinary. Its goals and objectives address individual, community, and system level issues that are influenced by social determinants of health disparities. This approach is used to affect individual as well as collective empowerment, while at the same time improve health outcomes.

Maternal Justice Programs