00:00Oh, pregnant.
00:02I'm really pregnant.
00:03This is it.
00:04It's on.
00:05Sort of planned, but not exactly planned.
00:08Let's see what would happen kind of situation.
00:12Hi, I'm Morgan, the mom of Gray, who was two years old.
00:16I had her when I was 28, and now I'm 30.
00:19My name is Khadija.
00:20I'm the mom of Zuri.
00:21She's one and a half.
00:22When I was pregnant, I was 22.
00:24I gave birth at 23, and I'm going to be 25 in a couple days.
00:28Being a black mom, you have to be the .
00:31What it means to be a black mother to me is to defy every stereotype that's put against us.
00:37You really have to be everything that your daughter needs and your son needs and your family needs
00:42because black moms are the backbone of the house.
00:46Black women that have children are often categorized as welfare queens and dependent on men.
00:53It makes me feel like I have a duty to my child and to other women to be a testament
01:01to the fact that she isn't a statistic or I'm not a statistic either.
01:05I am a black mother and I'm capable of raising a productive member of society.
01:10One of the biggest things that I experienced was how robotic and disconnected doctors are.
01:19Oh, research says do this, and you need to do this, and you need to get a flu vaccine.
01:24What?
01:25I knew I wanted a midwife more than a doctor, specifically a black midwife.
01:30A lot of medical professionals feel like black people have a higher pain threshold or that we're complaining or relying.
01:35That bias might have been put onto me as a black woman.
01:41Having a black woman that knows her stuff can relate.
01:44She would have my back more than anybody else.
01:46I got a midwife.
01:48I had this amazing birth plan.
01:51I'm going to go natural.
01:53I'm going to have a water birth, and it didn't work out that way.
01:57I'm 35 weeks, 5 days pregnant.
02:00And they're like, something's not right.
02:03You might have to do an emergency C-section, and that's exactly what happened.
02:08My original birth plan was to give birth in the birthing center.
02:12And because of how high my blood pressure was, that automatically disqualified me.
02:17In total, my whole labor lasted 12 hours.
02:21Postpartum experience was pretty rough.
02:23We ended up with a urinary tract infection.
02:26I was getting fevers, and I didn't have, you know, the urge to eat most days.
02:32And I only ended up breastfeeding my daughter for about two months.
02:38I intended to do it a lot longer than that, but it was just hard for me being sick.
02:44I didn't even tell anyone for days and maybe weeks that I had break.
02:51I had this emergency C-section, nothing I planned for, nothing I even looked into.
02:55Being a first-time mom, you think about the bells and the whistles, and having your baby.
03:01And I didn't have that.
03:02I knew you were going to get the questions of, what's going on?
03:05What's wrong?
03:05Are you okay?
03:06I didn't want anyone in my face.
03:07It was just a hard time.
03:08My family support is pretty strong.
03:11I have my mom and my dad.
03:13They would do anything for Zuri.
03:15My husband is the king of our village, and without him, I wouldn't be able to be as great as
03:21I am.
03:21My strongest quality as a black mother is to move mountains whenever possible for my child.
03:27You just have to trust your instincts.
03:30You just do the best you can and have the people around you who can support that, for sure.
