Side By Side Doula

31/10/2025

🌟 From legacy to living history - we celebrate three brilliant changemakers who are shaping the present and paving the way for a more equitable future.

Co-founders of Five X More, Atinuke Awe and Tinuke Oyediran launched a grassroots campaign to address the shocking statistic that Black women in the UK are five times more likely to die in childbirth. Their work has led to parliamentary debates, NHS reviews, and a wave of public awareness.
They’ve turned grief and outrage into action, building a movement that centres Black voices and demands accountability. Their courage shows us that change begins when we refuse to be silent - and when we organise with love and purpose.

Founder of The Motherhood Group, Sandra Igwe has created a vibrant space for Black mothers to connect, heal, and advocate. She’s also a member of the NHS Race & Health Observatory, pushing for systemic change from within.
Sandra’s work is rooted in visibility and validation. She reminds us that Black motherhood is not a monolith - and that joy, struggle, and resilience all deserve space. Her leadership is reshaping how institutions listen to and serve Black families. I was lucky enough to interview Sandra on the Doula UK Podcast. Episode 20 if you’d like to have a listen.

Mars Lord is a trailblazing birth activist, educator, and founder of Abuela Doulas. As one of the UK’s first Black doula trainers, she’s created space for culturally safe care and challenged the systemic biases that Black birthing people face. Her work is rooted in radical love, truth-telling, and unapologetic advocacy.
Mars reminds us that birth work is political. She teaches doulas to centre the lived experiences of marginalised communities and to speak truth to power. Her legacy is already shaping a new generation of birth workers who understand that equity begins with listening - and acting.

31/10/2025

✨ Continuing the journey through Black Makers of History, we honour three extraordinary changemakers whose legacies have shaped the perinatal world, though sadly not always in their lifetimes.

Henrietta Lacks was a young Black mother whose cancer cells - taken without her consent in 1951 - became the foundation of countless medical breakthroughs. Known as HeLa cells, they’ve been used in everything from cancer research to vaccine development. Yet her story is also one of exploitation, raising urgent questions about consent, ethics, and racial injustice in medicine.
Her legacy reminds us that Black bodies have too often been used without respect or recognition. Today, her descendants advocate for justice and ethical reform. Henrietta’s story is a call to honour the humanity behind scientific progress - and to ensure that no one is invisible in the systems meant to care for us.

Mary Francis Hill Coley, known as “Miss Mary,” was a legendary Black midwife who delivered over 3,000 babies in Georgia during segregation. She was featured in the 1953 documentary All My Babies, which became a training tool for medical professionals. Her work bridged traditional midwifery and modern medicine, all while navigating racial exclusion.
Miss Mary’s story is one of quiet resistance and deep community care. She reminds us that expertise doesn’t always wear a white coat - and that Black women have always been at the heart of birth justice, even when history tried to forget them.

In the 1970s, two Black mothers, Kathleen Locke & Coca Clarke, led a direct action in Manchester, occupying the West Indian Community Centre to demand nursery facilities for local families. Their protest was a powerful intersection of race, gender, and class activism - and it worked.
Their story is rarely told, but it’s foundational. They remind us that parenting is political, and that Black mothers have always fought for the resources their communities deserve. Their legacy lives on in every grassroots campaign that centres care and justice.

31/10/2025

📚 Honouring Legacy | Black Makers of History

These three books - Four Women, The Real McCoy, and Not Just Singing and Dancing - co-written by my father, Frank Forde, shine a light on the often-overlooked brilliance of Black changemakers whose contributions shaped our world. Through stories of inventors, artists, thinkers, and trailblazers, he captured the richness of Black excellence beyond the margins of mainstream history.

This post is the beginning of a trilogy celebrating Black makers - past and present. Next up: three pioneers from history whose impact still resonates, followed by three contemporary visionaries who are making history right now.

Let’s remember. Let’s celebrate. Let’s keep telling these stories.

15/10/2025

*Trigger warning* baby loss

Tonight, I light a candle along with others across the world - for the babies we carry in our hearts, not in our arms. For the dreams interrupted, the names whispered, the love that never fades.

As a doula and a loss mum, this flame holds layers of meaning. It honours my own story, and the stories I’ve held in sacred trust. I’ve sat beside grief, witnessed its quiet strength, and felt the ache of absence that reshapes everything. This light is for you - for your baby, for your love, for your courage.

May it shine gently into the silence. May it remind us that remembrance is an act of love. And may we continue to speak their names, hold space, and walk together.

11/07/2025

Say it louder for the people at the back….

Hear me out before you eye-roll… this is from the Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2023 paper comparing homebirth to hospital birth.

In the article they explain that homebirth is not the ‘intervention’ that needs researching, in fact the move into hospital birth for all women is the experimental intervention that requires review.

Archie Cochrane awarded ‘the wooden spoon’ to obstetrics in 1989 because ‘the speciality missed its first opportunity in the sixties, when it failed to randomise the confinement of low-risk women at home or hospital… then having filled the emptying beds by getting nearly all pregnant women into hospital, the obstetrician started to introduce a whole series of expensive innovations without any rigorous evaluation’

Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger, it’s not my fault that hospital birth became the norm without rigorous evaluation…

I’ll discuss this more on ep.160 of podcast ‘Is homebirth a good option for you’