For Social Justice, my topic is Women’s Reproductive Rights. I am in a group with Sadye, Georgia, and Cate. On September 16th, my group and I went on our first fieldwork to Every Mother Counts. Every Mother Counts is non-profit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. They encourage people to take action and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world. When we went to their office we met with Christy Turlington, Perrie Grace, and Maddie Wasserman. Christy Turlington founded Every Mother Counts after having a complication with her pregnancy. Perrie Grace shared with us that she has always been interested in maternal health/care and that she realized how preventable death by childbirth is and wanted to make a difference and dicrease those deaths. Maddy Wasserman is a doula and was inspired when her niece was born during a water birth. A doula is a woman who is trained to help another woman during childbirth. She may also provide support after the baby is born. Maddy told us that she enjoys this work because she not only gets to help bring in a new life into the world, but she gets to help others. I found all of these women’s stories very inspiring and interesting.

While we were there and when we were looking through their website, we learned quite a few things that were very eye-opening such as: every two minutes a woman dies from childbirth or complications during or after her pregnancy. That’s 303,000 women each year. When I read that and actually thought about it, I was really shocked and I realized how big of a problem this was and why I chose to do this topic again. Christy, Perrie, and Maddy also showed us a slideshow while we were there. It was a very empowering slideshow about women all over the world not getting the care they need and deserve. It was heartbreaking, but also very informative. This is an experience that I will remember for a very long time. This fieldwork taught me a lot and I can’t wait to go on more at learn more about this topic.