Dalia Abrams MPH, LCCE, BDT/CD(DONA), Co-Presenter

Dalia is the Program Director of BirthWell Partners, a community doula project based in Birmingham AL. She is the doula trainer for the program, mentors new BirthWell doulas and coordinates their work with BirthWell’s under-resourced/marginalized clients. Dalia has been doing birth work since 1997; teaching childbirth classes, providing breastfeeding support, birth doula work and most recently, training birth doulas (2013). She received her master’s degree in Public Health from UAB’s School of Public Health with a focus on Maternal and Child Health in 2006, and has since blended birthwork with reproductive justice advocacy through BirthWell Partners. She is also a wife and the mother of four amazing grown children. Dalia devotes her time to improving birth because she believes that an empowering birth experience powerfully and positively impacts the goals birth-givers and parents set for themselves, ultimately making the world a better place for us all.

Session

Community Based Strategies for Increasing Access to Doula Care

Birth doula support is widely recognized as an effective strategy to improve perinatal outcomes and reduce health care costs. However, in many states where families suffer some of the worst infant and maternal morbidity and mortality rates in the United States, birth doulas are underutilized. Furthermore, in states like Alabama, there is no Medicaid or insurance reimbursement for doula support services, making doula support available almost exclusively to pregnant families with more financial resources. In this session, Dalia Abrams and Holly Horan discuss results from their community-based research examining barriers and facilitators to increasing access to doula support in Alabama, and by extension, in the US South-East. They discuss their efforts to build coalitions within the local doula community, sharing their honest experiences about the successes and challenges of this work and the multi-level effort necessary to make doula care a more accessible and sustainable profession for doulas in Alabama and similar states.