She is part of a loosely organized movement of black midwives in the Los Angeles area who are attempting to stem the rates of African-American babies dying every year for preventable reasons. Employing holistic pre- and postnatal care, the midwives have simple goals: to bring the belief that black lives matter to the womb and to carry on the spirit of those who came before them in the name of reproductive justice.

The long history of black midwifery in the U.S. has been fraught with prejudice and discrimination. The first black midwives arrived in the U.S. from West Africa on slave ships in 1619, and for the next several hundred years, they assisted white and African-American communities, passing on knowledge and traditional healing methods to their daughters. By the turn of the 20th century, midwives were attending half of all births across the country. Black women utilized their services not only for financial reasons but also because they feared discrimination in institutionalized hospital settings.

In 1921, however, the Sheppard-Towner Act prompted the radical decline of the profession in the U.S. In the years preceding it, officials and doctors blamed midwives for high rates of infant mortality, deeming them unhygienic and uneducated. The act forced midwives to become licensed and receive training from nurses. As medical professionals established relationships in communities that midwives once served, the use of midwives diminished in much of the country.

The black midwife movement rebounded slightly in the early 1960s and ’70s, but despite the profession’s African-American roots, black midwives today account for fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s 15,000 midwives.

Racha Tahani Lawler knows the history of black midwifery better than anyone. She is a fourth-generation black midwife whose grandmother delivered more than 1,000 babies in Los Angeles hospitals during segregation. Lawler had all of her three children at home and has attended over 600 births.

In 2011, Lawler was a single mom on food stamps struggling to make her rent. She decided to open the Community Birth Center, the only black-owned birthing center in LA, after working in other centers and seeing the barriers that African-American women face in trying to receive respectful medical care. With startup money from two former clients, she acquired a space in the traditionally black neighborhood of South Los Angeles. In the beginning, Lawler split the food stamps she received between her family and patients at the birth center. She worked on a sliding scale, charging as little as $1,800 for delivery and full prenatal care to low-income women, less than half the standard rate.

Brenda Ball is one of Lawler’s clients. A gregarious African-American dance instructor, Ball had a horrible experience the first time she went into labor. She wanted an all-natural birth, but at the hospital, her contractions were stopped and induced with drugs, and she was given an epidural and C-section she never consented to. She was also forced to wait almost an hour before she could hold her baby.

For her second pregnancy, Ball opted for the birthing center. “At my first appointment, they just wanted to get to know me. That was such a shock, to just put the paperwork aside,” she says. “That’s not what you get at the hospital. It’s procedure. It’s routine. They stick you. They poke you. You don’t feel like a person.”