From Diplomat to Doula
If you asked me where I would be in my life 10 years ago, I would have laid out an entire fantasy for you. I would tell you about the family I’d be looking into starting, I would tell you about my flourishing life in Washington DC, and I would monologue about how much I loved my job with the US State Department. Before I get too far along, let me introduce myself. My name is Aleigha(like Princess Leia from Star Wars) and working for the United States Government, particularly the state department, is probably one of the last things I would be caught dead doing in 2024. To be fair, I don't know who’s life hasn’t changed dramatically over the last 10 years. That is a lot of time and we have had a lot of economic crashes and political nonsense between then and now to really stir the pot. But I wanted to write an introduction about how I went from wanting to be a diplomat to becoming a doula.
I was 15 when I decided I wanted to be a diplomat. I was fresh off of a Student Ambassador trip that my mom pinched, saved, and fundraised for. I remember that I even started selling cupcakes so that I would have spending money while I was there. I was so grateful to go and that trip honestly had me convinced that I could save the world through diplomacy. I was a young black woman, the child of immigrants. So of course I knew to a certain extent that there were injustices in the United States foreign policy. But that made it all the more important that I broke into diplomacy. I honestly believed that being able to get into those spaces would allow me to help promote progress and equity among the global community.
Eventually I went off to college. I had a good time doing just about everything except for learning what advancing American Foreign Policy actually meant. Have you ever had your heart broken and your dreams shattered by a political theory? It was not fun realizing that promoting equity abroad as a representative of the United States made about as much sense as collecting rainwater in a colander.
There is this one concept that was really the nail in the coffin for that dream. You see, in International Relations there is this concept called sovereignty and it is honestly the basis for, like, all of international politics. It essentially means that the nation state is an entity with every right to govern how it sees fit. It says that other countries and international organizations do not have the right to impede upon their goals for advancing their country. Now there are a multitude of international laws and treaties that technically prevent governments from flagrantly doing what they’d like. International human rights law even goes so far as to say that if there are atrocities being committed, or if a state is acting in a way that harms or is in contradiction with its population that it is the responsibility of the international community to intercede. The heartbreak sets in when you realize who makes the decisions of the international community though.
You see, the United States spends a lot of money and resources funding international organizations like the United Nations.That means that most UN missions to intercede into another country happens with United States dollars. Furthermore, they are permanent members of the Security Council so there are no peacekeepers being sent to intercede or provide aid without the approval of the United States. Not only are they making the rules of the game, they use the legal concept of sovereignty to deny the power of the International Court of Justice. So despite our posturing as a beacon of freedom on the international stage we dodge any form of legal requirement to follow any of those laws anyway…..mind you this is just the lack of accountability that my country is held to in the realm of the United Nations.
The efforts to maintain Western power through alliances;
The destabilization of other nations for their own economic and militaristic ends
The occupations they maintain in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico
The manipulation of developing countries through foreign aid
The lack of integrity the United States shows is abhorrent and seemingly endless at times, and the brutality and corruption that follows in its wake is despicable.
Suffice to say, I could rant all day about capitalism and militarism in the United States but it wouldn’t capture how it felt to know that my dream of working for the United States State Department was the equivalent of being a delegate sent out to represent the interests of the Empire.
Jokes aside, I honestly could not find a way to in good conscience advocate on behalf of the United States and be able to live with myself at the same time. So where did that leave me? Well luckily in college, I had some amazing professors who allowed us the ability to explore a range of issues and really hone in on the focus we were passionate about. I did research about a range of topics but the two pieces that never left me were about maternal mortality rates.
Writing that piece was probably the most difficult and the most gratifying research I ever completed. I poured over theory from black feminists, reports from human rights groups, and read so many articles about these incredible women who had died for utterly senseless and largely preventable causes. Maternal mortality has been on a continuous rise in the US over the last few decades. But to make it even more wrong, it had a huge disproportionate impact on black women. Currently, black women are 2.6 times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts.
I honestly still get emotional thinking about the nights I spent sitting in my dorm at night crying over somebody's Mom, their sister, their cousin, their auntie. It was awe inspiring to see the amount of work these communities did to lift up the names and the lives of these women. That doesn’t stop me from welling up right now, as I think about the fact that they had to do it in the face of such grief and injustice. I didn’t know it at the time but I had found a cause that I cared deeply about remedying and that was really only the tip of the iceberg.
Now an emotional paper or two is not a career path. It took me a little while to figure out what kind of work was calling to me, but I was starting to hear the voice. I knew that my brain had taken to unpacking how institutional violence and interpersonal forms of discrimination killed black women and those more marginalized than us. But it took the public health nightmare of COVID and the overturning of Roe V Wade to piece together, that I wanted to do reproductive justice work and organizing. It just made sense. I am a black queer woman in the United States in 2024. As much as I feel passionate about reproductive justice, it is also an act of survival. These issues impact me and these issues impact my community and I knew that I wanted to be part of the work to remedy them…So I’ve become a doula.
Doula’s wear many hats because pregnancy and reproductive health care is very specific to that person's needs. There are all sorts of ways that doulas support people throughout their pregnancy journey. I went to a training recently that stated doula work is where health care, social services, and community support intersect. I think it is one of my favorite definitions so far, so shout out to BADT (https://www.badoulatrainings.org/).
I am currently certified in pre & postpartum, labor & delivery, and lactation support and accepting clients. I am also working towards becoming certified in full spectrum support. That will allow me to help people with all aspects of reproductive healthcare from fertility treatments to abortion support. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to do this work. While there are many institutions and providers that don’t treat us in ways that recognize our humanity, I will do everything I can to make sure they do. No one deserves to deal with bias while trying to get help and necessary health care services. Least of all, no one should die or experience long term suffering because of discrimination and neglect.
Being able to help address the discrimination and subsequent comorbidities and death that people, especially black women and BIPOC queer folks face in their reproductive health is such a gift. And I will fight like hell to make a world where we don’t have to jump through hoops in order to get the care we deserve in the first place.
