The clinic is unassuming, in an office building just blocks from the revitalized downtown strip in Winter Garden, Fla., 30 minutes from Orlando. As you head up to the third floor, you might share the elevator with pregnant women making small talk in Spanish, a grandmother holding a newborn in a carrier, or a white woman with a baby strapped to her chest in an eco-friendly wrap.
When you enter the Birth Place, a friendly, bilingual receptionist greets you. After you’ve checked in, you can take a seat on a comfortable couch or chair in the homey waiting room. Jennie Joseph, the organization’s founder, executive director and a licensed midwife, calls it her “classroom in disguise.” At any given moment there might be a formal class, socializing among clients, or one-on-one chats with staff educators.
On its face, Joseph’s prenatal and postpartum clinic might not seem unusual. But when you look into her statistics, you find something quite rare: Almost all of her patients give birth to healthy, full-term babies. Again, maybe not surprising until you learn that the majority of them are low-income African-Americans, Haitians and Latinas.
[For more on this story by Miriam Zoila Pérez, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...fer-women-color.html]
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