Actress Yaya DaCosta helps birth children when she’s not on the big screen. The model, who rose to fame after being a runner-up in cycle 3 of America’s Next Top Model, has been in the birthing space for 15 years and is the host of the first annual Black Maternal Health Festival online.
“I’ve been a birth worker since 2010,” DaCosta told PEOPLE. “One of my teachers, a midwife, Sumayyah Franklin of Sumi’s Touch, is putting on this huge online festival where people are going to be chiming in from all around the world, discussing the Black Maternal Health Crisis, but from a place of solution finding, from a place of celebration,” she says.
The Butler actress is passionate about changing the birthing landscape for Black women who are more predispositioned to traumatic birth experiences.
“The most recent study has shown that since legislation and policy changes have been in the works, since doulas have been included in healthcare for people to be able to use their insurance, since all these changes have been made, the numbers of maternal mortality have decreased for white women, for Asian women, for Hispanic women, indigenous women, basically every demographic in this country — except Black women. Our numbers have worsened,” she said to PEOPLE.
Birth doulas can help with a range of services including advocating for women during pregnancy and assisting moms postpartum to help prevent burnout.
Yaya is hoping the festival will be a safe space for women and professionals to discuss solutions to the barriers Black women face when it comes to having safe and enjoyable birthing experiences.
“This is a very serious thing, and we are going to be talking about it [during the festival], but we’re going to be talking about it from a place of solutions,” she explained.
She continued, “Because so many people have this concern. They’re reading these articles and these moms are just scared. And so we need to know that other options are available that have not been shown to us.”
One of those options is a home birth, which the actress had during her first pregnancy. DaCosta gave birth to her son in what she described as an “an ecstatic home birth” back in 2013.
“My favorite thing is home birth because it’s just like, you can do what you want. You can play your music, you can dance, you can dim the lights, you can use all of the tools available to us, including pleasure, including your partner if they’re present in the process, understanding that there’s a correlation between the way that we get pregnant and the way that we get unpregnant.”
That said, Yaya acknowledges that home births aren’t accessible to everyone.
“Obviously, it’s not always possible, but I think it’s possible more often than we think because of what we’ve been told,” she concluded.
The festival is held from April 11-17, which is also Black Maternal Health Week.