Parents in Detroit will soon be able to seek birthing care at a Black-led freestanding birth center, the first of its kind in Michigan.

Birth Detroit, a community-based maternal health-care provider led by midwives on Detroit’s northwest side, has been serving families via the Easy Access Clinic in recent years. The goal from its inception in 2018 was to have its own center, said Elon Geffrard, Birth Detroit’s co-founder and perinatal support and education director.

That goal will soon come to fruition.

After launching a fundraising campaign in 2022, Birth Detroit raised $4 million to fund a freestanding birth center. To celebrate, the nonprofit plans to host a grand opening party in October, Geffrard said. The organization aims to shift its services from its shared space with Brilliant Detroit, a nonprofit that supports kids and families, to its new birth center and eventually serve more families. Birth Detroit has also partnered with the nonprofit health-care organization Henry Ford Health to send patients to its nearby facility in cases of an emergency, Geffrard said.

Birth Detroit offers pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, prenatal screenings, nutrition and breastfeeding support, and labor preparation. It also offers classes to educate people about nutrition, stress management, stages of labor, and other pregnancy information. Once open, Birth Detroit will continue—and aims to grow—classes, Geffrard said.

“It was important to us to create a birth center for Detroit in Detroit, because it’s never been done, and it’s not been a readily available option, particularly for Black and brown families in our community,” Geffrard said. “And so we wanted to be the first.”

Funding and building a birth center

Birth Detroit’s efforts to create the birth center started before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but when it arrived, Geffrard said, “We knew we needed to help families navigate systems that were oftentimes leaving them without support and advocacy.”

The center features two private exam rooms, a co-working space, laundry room, and a large birth suite that can be divided into two smaller birth suites, said Patrick Linder, managing partner at Detroit-based architecture firm Partners’ Design Build.

While designing the space, Linder said he sat with Birth Detroit’s midwives for two- or three-hour conversations. From there, the space was designed to feel like a “maxi home, not a mini hospital,” where birthing parents and families can feel at ease. The birthing suite features a curbless shower, a private deck, and a kitchenette with a mini-refrigerator, microwave, and dimmable lights. When divided into two smaller suites, each birthing suite is temperature controlled

The birthing suite has a kitchenette with a mini-refrigerator, dimmable lights, and an inflatable tub that can be filled and drained using a customized system, Linder said. The center also has a “care square” station for the organization’s midwives, complete with a medical refrigerator, lockers, and a hand-washing station.

“I hope they feel at home,” Linder said. “I hope they feel like they belong here and that they’re welcome.”

The staff wrote “our intentions, prayers, hopes, and [our] affirmations” on the beams within the center before they were encased in drywall, Geffrard said. One of Geffrard’s affirmations was “we will not lose one,” a prayer to not lose one child or birthing parent on their watch, she said.

In the future, Birth Detroit hopes to open a location on the city’s east side, so more residents can access its services. However, it would only do so with support from the community, Geffrard said.

“We didn’t get into this work to be fluffy or to have good feelings only,” she said. “We came to make an impact because mothers and babies were dying in our community, and they didn’t have to.”

Birth Detroit’s new center will be one of few Black-owned birthing centers in the United States, a disparity driven in part by the country’s racial wealth gap, Geffrard said. The nonprofit tapped the Wright Collective, a national fundraising agency, in 2021 to help with raising money. Reflecting on her 15-year tenure in philanthropy, Alyssa Wright, founder and principal of the Wright Collective, said many nonprofits remain dependent upon donors, because they don’t receive enough money to own their assets and build wealth within the community.

After launching its fundraising campaign, Birth Detroit raised funding from both large nonprofits such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and from community supporters, which went toward buying the land, constructing the facility, and hiring a clinical team and running the center for two years, Wright said. Because Michigan does not reimburse midwives in community care settings, Birth Detroit is continuing to raise funding to support its staff, Geffrard said.

“I was really excited about the birth center model, because I saw it not only as the opportunity to create better birth experiences for families but also as an economic opportunity for social entrepreneurs in the community to build wealth by opening, owning, and operating their own health-care centers,” Wright said.

Henry Ford Health declined to comment on the birth center’s opening, but a spokesperson shared the letter of support that Adnan Munkarah, Henry Ford Health’s president of care delivery system and chief clinical officer, and D’Angela Pitts, director of maternal infant health equity, wrote for the center to its board of directors in August 2023.

“We support and actively participate in initiatives that raise awareness and address the root causes of racial and ethnic disparities surrounding pregnancy through social justice, systems change, and equipping our community with resources,” Pitts and Munkarah said in the letter. “We at Henry Ford Health understand that there is a need for improved care related to maternal social and racial inequities in the community and hope that the opening of the Birth Detroit birthing center will make strides in addressing those needs.”

The rise of birth centers

Other birth centers are emerging across the country amid a nationwide conversation about Black maternal and infant health. As of January 2022, there were 400 birth centers in 40 states, up from 124 in 1984, according to the American Association for Birth Centers.

In the United States, the Black maternal deaths across the country outpace those of other wealthy countries. The U.S. maternal death rate in 2022 was about 22 birthing people per 100,000 births, exceeding other high-income nations. The maternal death rate for Black women was the highest in the United States, according to a Commonwealth Fund study.

In Michigan, the Black infant mortality rate has declined over the past five decades, but Black babies in the state are still more likely to die than white babies. Between 1970 and 2022, the state’s disparity in Black and white infant mortality rates peaked in 1972 when roughly 32 Black infants died, compared to 16 white infants per 1,000 births that year. In 2022, 13 Black babies died per 1,000 births, higher than about just over four white infant deaths per 1,000 deaths, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In Detroit’s Wayne County, the Black infant mortality rate was roughly 16 per 1,000 deaths between 2020 and 2022, more than double the death rate of white infants per 1,000 births in that same period, according to the HHS figures.

Detroit and its surrounding metro area are filled with renowned hospitals and medical facilities. Still, traditional medical systems generally are large and may not have the capacity to check in with families along their pregnancy journey. By contrast, birth center care allows families to get more frequent check-ins and possibly spot potential risks along the way, Geffrard said.

As awareness about the U.S. maternal death rate grows, the rise of birth centers could partially be attributed to the realization that the maternal death problem is “affecting all of us,” Geffrard said.

“Systems are also being put to task because of preventable deaths happening in systems,” she said. “But we still have a long way to go, and birth centers are just a part, a major part in shifting those outcomes and ultimately those narratives.”