In 2013, Monique Rodriguez was eight months pregnant when she knew something was wrong. The labor and delivery nurse understood the warning signs well. When she suffered a uterine rupture, she repeatedly tried to tell the doctors caring for her that something didn’t feel right. She was advocating for herself in exactly the way Black women are told they must. Still, Rodriguez says, she wasn’t heard in time. Her son, Milan, died.
Her experience fundamentally changed how she thinks about the advice routinely given to Black women navigating healthcare. “We have to recognize that women can advocate for themselves and still not be heard,” she said. “The responsibility doesn’t just lie on the patient.” More than a decade later, Monique Rodriguez, who founded the successful hair care company Mielle Organics, is turning one of the most painful experiences of her life into a $2 million commitment to BirthFUND, the maternal-health organization founded by journalist and author Monique Rodriguez that supports midwifery.
It wasn’t an immediate pivot to advocacy for Rodriguez but one that took years of grappling with grief. She had watched Welteroth’s work from afar and repeatedly received invitations to BirthFUND events. She declined them. Hearing joyful birth stories meant confronting the fact that her own ended differently.
Then, during a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, the two women unexpectedly ran into each other. Rodriguez shared Milan’s story with Welteroth. Welteroth said she was “gutted.”
“Monique is more than a funder,” Welteroth told The Root. “She understands this issue as a survivor of a broken system that robbed her of her child’s life. There are no words for that level of heartbreak, for that trauma, that unthinkable loss.”
For Rodriguez, joining the work has become part advocacy, part legacy, and in some ways part of her own continued healing. “I think that I probably need to do more healing,” she said. “A lot of this is still helping me heal because you never get over it, right?”
That grief is also why Rodriguez wants the conversation about Black maternal health to extend beyond whether a mother survives childbirth. There are women living with traumatic pregnancies, stillbirth, infant loss, and difficult births long after they leave the hospital. After Milan died, Rodriguez remembers the immediate concern from people around her eventually fading. She had the support of her husband, family, and faith, but said she doesn’t remember the hospital offering trauma therapy or other long-term support.
“I think that we just need to talk about it more and not act like it doesn’t exist,” she said.
BirthFUND is trying to tackle another piece of that conversation by expanding access to midwifery care and increasing the number of people trained to provide it. As part of its partnership with Rodriguez, BirthFUND is supporting a new midwifery scholarship program at Kennedy-King College on Chicago’s South Side. The college has been working with the Black Midwifery Collective to establish the program. The inaugural cohort is expected to include 20 students, with the scholarship named after Milan.
The program is expected to begin in January, with the goal of funding the full first cohort and, through Rodriguez’s multi-year commitment, future cohorts as well.
For Welteroth, expanding midwifery isn’t about pitting midwives against doctors. She hopes to give women, especially women of color, more options and more agency over their pregnancies. “This is not just about saving lives,” Welteroth said. “This is about treating women and their bodies with respect, dignity, and giving them the autonomy to make the right choice of care for themselves.”
“My goal with BirthFUND is to reach future moms before they’ve experienced the trauma that I’m talking about, that Monique has lived,” Welteroth said. “We try to catch the younger ladies, the next generation of moms, before they get put into that system.”
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