Latham Thomas, founder, Mama Glow, shares her journey into birth work and maternal health advocacy, inspired by her early exposure to women’s health through her mother. She explains the vital but distinct roles of doulas and midwives, reflects on her own breastfeeding experience and unpacks the systemic barriers that make breastfeeding more difficult – particularly for Black women. Through Mama Glow, she advances maternal health by providing doula support, education and policy advocacy to promote health opportunities for all families.
Guest: Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow
Host/Producer: Carol Vassar
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the world’s top-ranked children’s health podcast produced by Nemours Children’s Health. Subscribe on any platform at NemoursWellBeyond.org or find us on YouTube.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Each week, we’ll be joined by innovators and experts from around the world, exploring anything and everything related to the 85% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you are here, let’s go.
MUSIC:
Let’s go, oh, oh, Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Latham Thomas joins us for this episode. Latham is an author, an educator, and the founder of Mama Glow, whose work is transforming the way we think about birth, postpartum care, and the health of both moms and babies. In our conversation, she shares the experiences that inspired her to become a leader in birth work, unpacks the important, yet often misunderstood, differences between doulas and midwives, and opens up about the barriers that can make breastfeeding more challenging for some people and communities than others. Latham’s journey to this vital work started in childhood when her mother spoke openly, honestly, and with anatomical precision about all things associated with the female body. Here’s Latham Thomas.
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
I’ve had the pleasure of being exposed to women’s health, body literacy, and education through my mother, who was really a powerful advocate for us to understand everything we could know about our bodies. And so that advocacy started at around age four when she was pregnant with my sister. And so that experience of being a child and navigating this experience of my mother being pregnant, my aunt being pregnant, and my great aunt all at the same time was fascinating, but it was also deeply enriching because my mom ensured that I had access to educational tools.
I had Gray’s Anatomy coloring books, I was learning about anatomy and how to pronounce parts by name, and that was a huge deal in our household. And so one of the things my mom’s really proud about that she tells everyone is that, “Yes, my daughter, at four years of age…” When my mom was about seven months pregnant, we were in a grocery store, and I corrected someone who said my mother had a baby in her tummy. I said, “No, there’s a baby in her uterus, and it’s going to come out of her vagina.” And so I would say that the seeds were planted there, but really the work started when my son was born and he’s actually, at this point, graduated college, and that is a huge –
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Congratulations.
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
Thank you. Huge milestone, but also one that I think back to very fondly because I nursed him for three years. And I had the privilege, I would say, of being able to do that, which is not possible for everyone. And I don’t take for granted that it took planning, it took forethought and foresight, and it actually took support of community around me to make that possible. Because we don’t have children in a vacuum, we have children in community. We birth and raise our children in relationship to others who are around us. And so that birth village that your child is born into will also impact the type of postpartum experience you have as well. And so for me, I think one of the big things was really trying to ensure that other people had access to the type of experience that I had, which was midwifery-supported birth and postpartum support, delivering in New York City and having access to a freestanding birth center, meaning a birth center that is not attached to a hospital, but that is independent and run by midwives, and so I was able to deliver in a place like that.
And as I thought about it, I’m like, “Wow, I had this transformative experience and a lot of people don’t have this, or have access to this.” And so I wanted to really create a pathway to ensure that it was possible for others, and so that’s how Mama Glow became. And it was born out of, I think, a need to also embrace this time in one’s life as powerful and potent and transformative, and to really reclaim this rite of passage, because birth is a rite of passage, it’s sacred, and it’s really a powerful time for us to come to know ourselves more deeply. It’s also a really powerful time to grow into our personhood and to become. It’s really a state of becoming. And so I sought to support people through handholding and through the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual support that doulas provide.
And so what we do at Mama Glow is not only educate doulas and nurse care managers to serve on the front lines as maternal healthcare providers, but also we match families with doulas so that they can have the experiences of their desire. We also help insurance providers establish doula benefits for their employees, and also for people who are looking to pay for their doulas or get insurance to cover their doula support. We are actively doing work in maternal health advocacy and policy, and improving the rates for doula reimbursement as well as for pay so that it’s a thriving wage for doulas.
And then also really looking to bring this work into academia. And we have done that through the work at Brown University where I’m a visiting professor of gender studies, and have brought in this coursework for students who are going the path of OB-GYN or public health or bioethics medical anthropology or pre-med, to ensure that they get the access to this information that’s so crucial as they bridge into other areas of education that are not necessarily looking at doula care, and really caregiving efforts that are more in the non-clinical space as important for resourcing, important for learnings, and instituting shifts that impact positively on our healthcare outcomes for mothers and birthing individuals.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Now, I know we want to concentrate mostly on breastfeeding today, but I have a question, and this is probably going to be the dumbest question ever asked –
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
No question…
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
… especially considering I’m a mother of three and a grandmother of one. What is the difference between a doula and a midwife?
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
That’s a great question. Doulas are non-clinical care providers that offer emotional support, physical support, education, advocacy tools, if you have a partner present, they can offer partner support as well, they show up on the front lines. Doulas really serve as the person who’s going to ensure that everything moves as smoothly as possible. We think about a midwife…a midwife is a clinician. They’re a clinical care provider that’s there to provide care along the reproductive health life course. So we think about first period to last period. That’s where a midwife can really offer the best support to you. And they offer well care at every juncture. You do not have to be pregnant. So typically speaking, when someone starts to become sexually active or once they move into puberty, they may start seeing their GYN.
For midwifery, this could start also as… I mean, this could be a person who delivered you but then also watched you grow, and now you’re of age and starting to bleed, and they’re giving you holistic care options for taking care of yourself as you navigate your fertile years. And then supporting you through things like obviously pregnancy, miscarriage, loss, things like that that may occur, and offering support, but also insight on how to care for yourself through these challenging times in ways that we don’t get when we think about going to necessarily…. Maybe if we go to our OB-GYN, we don’t necessarily get the same type of care that’s as much of hand-holding as you do when you’re working with a midwife. And so midwives also typically do kind of house calls, and so they’ll deliver you at home or in a birth center, depending on… And sometimes hospital settings as well, depending on the type of midwife and the setting. You can choose your option, but I would definitely say the midwifery model of care is one that centers the patient, and it’s one that really honors autonomy.
So, there’s all kinds of reasons for why somebody might look into midwifery support. But also, if you are low risk, and you could have an out-of-hospital birth, it’s a great option. And if you’re someone who thinks that they may be open to non-pharmaceutical pain relief to manage birth, then midwifery care is a great pathway. And we’ve been using this model of women supporting women and community-centered birthing since we realized that we could have babies to begin with. So this is something that we’ve always done. And so coming back to this kind of care, I think, feels really nourishing for many people. And so doulas and midwives work well together. They are like a team. They don’t replace each other. So a doula cannot replace a midwife.
A midwife can also fill the role of a doula. So if you go to… Say you have a delivery that gets complex or complicated and it needs to be transferred away from the birth center or the home environment into the hospital, your midwife can slip into the role of facilitating doula support, while a physician who may come in to do surgical delivery may take the lead. And so that may happen, but typically speaking, those are two separate roles always. And a doula is always delivering alongside a clinician. And so they’re always alongside a doctor or midwife. Doulas are not intended to deliver your babies. So you use them as a non-clinical support person who really is there to essentially be handholding with you along your process as you prepare for your birth and in postpartum.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
So once the baby is born, we all know that breast is best, that’s been the motto, if you will, unofficially, for many, many years. Let’s talk about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding rates have shown significant disparities across racial and socioeconomic lines. You presented on this, talked about this at South by Southwest. Unpack the science, unpack the systemic factors that are contributing to a lower initiation and continuation rate, especially in black and brown communities.
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
I would first like to frame up, as we talk about breastfeeding awareness, and then on Black Breastfeeding Week, which is August 25th through 31st, this is a time where we look at disparity, but we also look at the great strides that we have made in policy and advocacy and addressing some of the systemic barriers and cure gaps that exist. In the United States, we don’t have a federal paid leave policy in place, and people who are most vulnerable to that are folks who work high-touch positions that are on the front lines. And so our frontline workers and folks who had to work during COVID and expose themselves, we think about those people who, if they don’t work, they don’t make money, because they don’t have insurance or they are doing work that’s not salaried, and so these are people who are vulnerable. They have to go back to work right away. And so you think about what it means to go back to work 10 days after having a baby, which is what one in four women do in the United States.
So if you have to go to work right after, how do you establish feeding? How do you establish feeding patterns? How do you set up for yourself pumping? And how do you get into a place where you have a routine yet? You’re not in a routine because your body’s in flux, and it’s also healing. And so then we’re forcing separation so that you’re not near your baby, which we know, when we think about this from a neuroscience perspective, that closeness and connection activates oxytocin production, vasopressin, which also creates this sense of bonding connection, but also have neuroprotective effects in lactating female mammals. So we see that they’ve come closer to their infants, they become more caring, and so when we don’t have that access and that closeness or that connection, or when that’s disrupted, there are consequences for that. And we haven’t actually done a great job of measuring long-term what it could mean on a population.
But we think about it on an individual level, yes, there is an impact. People suffer when they’re not around their babies or when their babies are not close to them. We experience high levels of postpartum depression and anxiety in this culture because of the way that we institute care and what the postpartum period looks like in the United States. And so it’s important to… Human milk is a first food, human milk is an important substance, and it’s not just about the food, it’s also the act of that closeness, that connection, and having a buffering adult presence for that baby to nestle while they feed. It’s not like having a machine feed a baby and that… We can’t AI our way out of this. You need human connection to thrive. We are designed this way, Mother Nature is deeply invested in our ability to survive through connection, through bonding. So we need that closeness.
And this is interrupted in the ways that we currently foster care in this country and the ways that we currently design postpartum experiences for mothers and birthing folks. This is disrupted when we aggressively market formula to people who are vulnerable, who may be on the fence, or not know what they may want to do. We see this happening, obviously statistically, to people of color and populations of black women and birthing folks as well, where they’re over-marketed and highly marketed to, when it comes to a formula. They are under-supported when it comes to lactation support, and have less access to lactation resources. They’re more likely not to be visited by the lactation consultant after birth in the hospital. They are also likely to be seen as folks who would give up easier, and so a provider will rather spend time with a mother of a different background because they believe that they may succeed or have the resources succeed in infant feeding, and so they’ll put the resources there instead of come to your room even though you would be most vulnerable and your baby would really need that milk.
But there’s a lot of things when we think about the fraught relationship that black women have had with their bodies. There’s been this idea of autonomy over one’s body, which is a really new concept, actually, for black women, because our bodies were utilized as a foundation of a system of capitalism that was based upon human bodies. And it was a birthing of babies that would be born into slavery, and the feeding and sustaining of those infants, it would be the black milk which sustained the babies of the enslavers when they were born. They would feed those babies through wet nursing. And even into reconstruction, this was something happening as well, and even into Jim Crow. So this was a long period, and we can reach back to relatives who had to endure this.
And so when you think about reclamation of breastfeeding, there is a wound. There’s a psychic wound that carries through the community that we can feel, but we can’t always contextualize that, that feeling that we might have about disconnection or maybe this feeling of a fraught connection. It’s definitely trauma. We don’t necessarily know why we’re feeling pain that might be connected to our grandmother, or great-grandmother’s pain. And so I think that there’s that too that we have to sit with, that this is a time that is powerfully potent to reclaim the stories that we have around breastfeeding to be able to advocate for a space of our own to celebrate this period, but also to understand the unique challenges that black women and birthing people face, and other people of color as well, but particularly this group of people who had this unique experience in the United States, and their descendants.
This is important for us to acknowledge and also to learn from, because we can learn from the failures there. We can learn from what it means in terms of a public health crisis. When we look at certain counties where no babies are being breastfed in this country, and formula is really dependent upon, but people who cannot afford it. And what does that do in a culture where we have people literally sending you to formula as a pathway instead of saying, “Let’s get everybody well-fed and make sure that the first food is human milk,” which we know is more than just nutrition, it’s protection. And when folks talk about the comparison formula to breast milk, they talk about nutrition only. They never ever talk about immune factor, which is not possible to duplicate in a formula product. There’s only things that the human body can do that we can never duplicate through formula. There’s no way to invent this.
And I know that there’s all kinds of scientific study, and we can, “Oh, we’re going to fortify milk,” and you can do all of that. You can put vitamins, and you can put minerals, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be assimilated. And so I think this idea that we have in this culture that extracting certain nutrients and then putting them into a concoction means that the body will recognize it. No, it means you made a formula, you made a compound, which we have to see what the impact will be. We have to see what the body actually does when it encounters this product. And so it’s really an experiment if we think about it. We’re asking people to trust and to put their faith into a product that we don’t know what it means for the long term.
And Mother Nature is so smart that there would never be a world in which we would need to depend on another mammal’s milk to support our offspring. So yes, there are instances where it makes sense, and that we have to. And if you think about how we evolved, we evolved around all kinds of animals. So we were eating those animals, the reproductive byproduct of those animals as well. We eat eggs, or we eat…. So that’s fine. It’s not taking away that you should or shouldn’t do it. It’s not an argument of that. What the argument here is, is that we actually produce our own milk, and people are disgusted by that. Why? And so the way that we have been indoctrinated to see the literal life-giving fluid that comes to literally grow us, literally, is designed to protect us and to help us to grow, that we would see it as disgusting.
And so that is what we need to sort of shift. Culturally, why is this our belief? Why is it that if you’re breastfeeding in public, someone wants you to cover up? So there’s an interesting layer here that we have to uncover culturally that impacts and impedes our ability to really get things done and to advance this amazing pathway. People talk about all the time, like, “normalize breastfeeding,” and it seems like, well, isn’t it normalized? You would think so, but then when you look at all these cultural barriers, it seems like it’s not. So I think that there’s many disparities, obviously, in access to information. There’s also disparities in rates of breastfeeding, and we understand that there are sociological structural barriers, cultural ones, as well as systemic gaps in care. We just know that when you go home, you may or may not have community that can support you as a postpartum person.
And so that in and of itself can be deflating. And not having someone there to cheer you on or tell you you can do it may be the difference between you nursing for three days, three weeks, or three years. Everyone needs support. And so I think that from my experience of being able to nurse for three years, my mother showed up. She was a first-generation. Her mother, which is my grandmother, did not nurse any of her babies. And at the time, it was gauche; you were not supposed to. It was seen as formula all the way they were marketed, and she was told that that was the way to go. And so she did that because she also wanted to seem like someone who was not poor and who did the things that other people did. And so then my mom was of the generation in the 70s and 80s, that was like, “You reclaim your body, more natural pathways…” and stuff, and so she was like, “I’m nursing.” And she nursed me and my sister, and and my aunt did too. And so that was the first generation that did that.
And then my generation, I had the support. My mom came and she helped me with latching my son, and she came to the appointments and everything, and I saw a Lactation consultant the first week, and then I got really used to it and I enjoyed it, and I got into a rhythm with my son, and I could have even gone longer. I think that he was starting pre-K or pre-school. And I was like, “Maybe we should…”
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Isn’t the world average around three or four years?
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
I think it’s even five. There’s some places that go a little longer. So yeah, I think the world average is five. But yeah, you’re right. Close to four is probably more on what we see.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
But here in the U.S., it’s a lot different.
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
A lot different here. And also, people shame you. If the baby is walking around, they make fun of you. They’re like, “Oh, they’re in a stroller still, and they can talk,” and it’s like, “Yes, they can.” And no, it’s not that they need it, but is it your choice or your business to be telling someone whether or not their baby should stop? Because by the way, when it’s over, it’s over. You don’t get to start it back up again. And so if you’re somebody who stopped before you were ready, you don’t get that time back. You can’t restart. I mean, you can, but it’s not like you’re going to restart. It’s like once you wean, you kind of move on. And so I feel like a lot of people have these stories that ended early or ended earlier than they would’ve desired, and people carry that with them. They carry the wound of that.
If they weren’t able to breastfeed, they carry the sense of failure around that. Even though it’s not a failure, they feel that, and they internalize that, just like people internalize the outcome of their birth to mean something about them as a person and whether or not they were capable or that they are good or bad or weak or strong, they internalize that. And so I just feel as though we need to tell a different story, and we need to remove the systemic barriers that make it impossible for people to breastfeed. It’s one thing to say breast is best, it’s one thing to say this is the best pathway forward, you have to do milk, you have to breastfeed, cool, look at all these barriers that make it impossible for me to do this. Look at the fact that I have to go back to work. Look at the fact that I don’t have to support. All of these things. Look at the fact that they gave me a stack of formula before I left the hospital. And it’s not necessary. I didn’t ask for this, right?
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Yes, exactly. So you’ve laid out the issue. You’ve talked about some of the things that we can do as a community, that we can do personally, supporting our daughters and our sisters. What can happen in the policy realm? Is there anything that can change in the policy world that can help to impact and increase breastfeeding and close that gap?
Latham Thomas, Founder, Mama Glow:
Yeah. So first of all, I would say there’s a lot that is happening. It was great to see the PUMP Act to get passed. We have so many active and ongoing pieces of legislation that come down, that refine or get closer to you making breastfeeding easier. But beyond that, I would say, a lot of it’s culture. A lot of it’s the workplace. How do we create environments and facilitate spaces where people feel safe? What are the rooms that they can nurse in? It’s so interesting, people are always so proud of their nursing room, and they’re always empty. And people never know why. And I’m like, “Well, where’s the baby?” Not here.
And so if you were to really have a place where children were on site or able to be in an adjacent facility or wherever, where they were close, then people could bring their babies in those rooms and they can nurse them. But just expecting someone to go in a room because it’s pink and it has pillows and soft lighting, and that’s going to make them feel better about being separated from their child, that’s not how we do postpartum care, that’s thoughtful. Can we think about what it means to orchestrate paid leave, what it means to also facilitate these conversations about your family plan at the time of signing on to work for a company, and what my future will look like? I want to work in this way. I’m having a baby, or I plan to have a baby. Okay, well, here’s what it looks like for you to come back. Here’s what it looked like for you to transition back.
Think about that, have those questions early. Ask them, but also design this. And I think people can work together. Parents can work together to help facilitate better systems for people who are onboarding in these corporate settings as well. And then people who don’t have that kind of security, who work a different type of job, should also be thinking, what is it that I can do or design within my community? Can my mom come for a few days? Can family members take turns?
I saw something recently, a woman said that her sister adjusted her work schedule so that she could be free to watch the baby, so that when she turned back to work, and then her mom did a similar thing so that the baby never had childcare. And so this kind of thing where community can… Do you have a safety net where people can do something like that? If you don’t have family members but you have friends, can you put a babysitting co-op together? If someone’s struggling with milk production, do we have some overproducers or folks who may have a little bit stored? Can we pull together some human milk for that infant? So we got to think about things outside the box and also lean into community more, I think, for some of these solutions. And I feel like that also helps us to see… I look to marginalized communities to see how people have been solving problems. And that is what we can use as we think about our larger-scale approaches to addressing these issues.
So I just think that, intimately speaking, we need to have a broader discussion and approach to caring for folks in this time, but also thinking about what makes sense for the future, what makes sense for how we design the future. And what I think makes sense a lot now in this moment that we’re living, is leaning into our community resources, leaning on each other, leaning on our ancestral knowledge, leaning onto what are the things that our grandmothers and aunts did, and bringing back a lot of that knowledge, because that knowledge transfer is so critical, but it’s also tried and true. A lot of these things that they did, the foods that they had us eating, the ways that they were helping us to navigate our postpartum experience that we have lost, bringing those back.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Latham Thomas is the founder of the global maternal and education platform, Mama Glow.
MUSIC:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What Latham said is true. We’re releasing this episode during Breastfeeding Awareness Month, and specifically, Black Breastfeeding Awareness Week. We’re grateful to Latham Thomas for her work and for her time spent with us. And thanks to you as well for listening.
The Nemours Well Beyond Medicine Podcast is always looking to highlight topics affecting children’s health. Maybe you have an idea for the podcast. We’re listening in several different ways. You can email your ideas to [email protected], or you can go to the nemourswellbeyond.org website and leave us a voicemail. NemoursWellBeyond.org is podcast central for you, a place to leave a review and listen to previous episodes of the podcast, which is also found on your favorite podcast app and on the Nemours YouTube channel. Please subscribe to the podcast on any or maybe even all of these platforms.
Our production team for this episode includes Cheryl Munn, Susan Masucci, Lauren Teta, and Alex Wall. Video editing by Sebastian Riella and Britt Moore. Audio editing by yours truly. Join us next time as we hear about a kitchen table idea that has grown into a family-centered digital health tool, creating personalized care plans for children with chronic diseases. I’m Carol Vassar. Until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good, Well Beyond Medicine.
MUSIC:
Let’s go, oh, oh, Well Beyond Medicine.
