As the state of reproductive health continues to evolve more than a year after the conservative-leaning Supreme Court overturned abortion protections codified in Roe v. Wade, Black health equity advocates in Chicago are responding to the growing need for reproductive health care in south-side neighborhoods. Such areas have long been disenfranchised and deprived of the same attentive pre- and postnatal and postpartum care received by their counterparts in wealthier areas of the city. 

Among those looking to leave their mark is the team at the Chicago South Side Birth Center (CSSBC), a nonprofit, Black midwife–led birth center expected to open in South Shore by the end of 2025. Through the CSSBC, founder Jeanine Valrie Logan and her team are working to address long-standing reproductive health-care shortfalls experienced by scores of Black birthing people and their families.

While Valrie Logan’s endeavor to establish a birth center has been years in the making, it got a major push in August 2021, when an Illinois law, the Alternative Health Care Delivery Act,  increased the number of birth centers allowed to operate in the state from 12 to 17—legislation that Valrie Logan herself helped draft. Additionally, just last month, the Illinois General Assembly approved House Bill 5142, the Birth Equity Initiative, now awaiting the governor’s signature. The bill will require insurers to cover all pregnancy, postpartum, and newborn care provided by doulas and certified professional midwives; ensure midwife services are covered under state medical assistance programs; and expand access to reproductive health care. Having already passed the Senate, the bill now heads to Governor J.B. Pritzker who has committed to signing it. The measure will “close the tragic gap in maternal mortality between Black women and other new parents, and [ensure] we meet the unique pregnancy, birthing and postpartum needs of women across our state,” Pritzker wrote on Twitter.

As a lactation specialist, birth justice activist, certified nurse midwife, and leader-in-residence at Chicago Beyond—the philanthropic organization investing more than $1.8 million into the CSSBC—Valrie Logan is more than familiar with the struggles Black birthing people and their families face. With a yearslong career in reproductive health care, coupled with her personal experiences as a mother, she believes fervently that providing south-siders with concordant, culturally centered reproductive health care will make building families less fraught while also facilitating increased wellness in marginalized communities overall. “A place like Chicago South Side Birth Center deserves to exist, where we are centering people’s community and culture to increase wellness, not only for the birthing person and the newborns but also the whole family and community,” Valrie Logan says. 

Currently, there are no independent birth centers—freestanding health-care facilities for childbirth often staffed by midwives, doulas, and nurses—on the south side. Residents of this part of the city experiencing pregnancy and seeking care have to visit one of several hospitals, many of which struggle with the large volume of patients they serve and threaten to buckle under the financial weight of operations, like Mercy Hospital, the city’s oldest hospital, which closed in 2021 after nearly 170 years. That leaves many to navigate what Valrie Logan calls a “very disjointed system” without a universal place for patients to access resources. The overburdened health-care system is compounded by community distrust, a lack of transportation, and more. Many people either can’t get to or don’t want to go to their local hospital, Valrie Logan says. She’s cognizant that the nation’s history of medical racism and widespread racial disparities in the health industry have led scores of Black and Brown people to distrust traditional medicine. For providers like her and the CSSBC team, this means taking such concerns seriously. “When you focus on the most marginalized in the most divested communities, then everyone gets better.”

According to Anastasia Harris, a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Center for Health Equity Transformation, Chicago’s south side is a maternal care desert, an area without sufficient access to hospitals or birth centers that offer obstetric care and have obstetric providers. Black women are nearly three times as likely to die during childbirth as white women and Black infant mortality rates are not much better, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Harris believes building trust with the community is essential for making birth centers a reliable reproductive health-care option. “We’re seeing that if trust is built, folks are more likely to adhere to medical advice, and people have a better experience overall.” She says health equity research is “crucial and beneficial, and definitely a foundation to all of the work that needs to be done.”