Why We Started
OUR STORYAn Alarming Reality
Despite state and national quality improvement initiatives, clinical safety bundles, technological advances & social protections, and safe motherhood initiatives, hospitals do NOT keep Black women, girls, and gender expansive people safe.
Hospitals willfully watch the death or near death gap persist or widen between Black mothers and birthing people and other racial/ethnic groups, in different hospital settings and across different perinatal conditions, experiences, or outcomes.
OUR OBJECTIVE
Our primary objective is to build community and hospital capacity and capability to recognize and respond to the phenomenon of obstetric racism as Black women, girls, gender expansive individuals, and their given and chosen family seek help or health care in hospital settings for any pregnancy-related condition, with a focus on hospital labor, birth, and immediate postpartum.
OUR MISSION
The mission of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC is to improve the quality, safety, and value of health care experiences (“improvement science”) and facilitate community and health system uptake of evidence, empathy, and equity based interventions into any policy, process, practice, procedure, program or publication that affects human beings and their health, with a focus on advancing equity, justice and liberation of Black women, girls, gender expansive individuals, and their given and chosen family (“implementation science”).
OUR VISION
Our vision is to build a more humane and just health system that integrates patient experiences and community wisdom of Black women, girls, gender expansive individuals, and their given and chosen family into health services design, provision, evaluation, and training through application of Cultural Rigor throughout all health and human services. We build community and organizational capacity in birthing cultural rigor in everyday care interactions, communication, counseling, decision-making, and documentation and dissemination of health related information.
What is Cultural Rigor?
In 2020, Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG, first defined Cultural Rigor, which combines the principles and practices of scientific rigor, as defined by the National Institutes of Health, and cultural humility, as defined by two Black women physicians and public health scholars in 1998, Melanie Tervalon, MD, MPH, and Jann Murray-Garcia, MD, MPH.
In addressing the ongoing inequities and injustices surrounding the manufactured Black maternal health crisis in the United States, Dr. Scott needed a blueprint to expand the value of cultural humility beyond interprofessional education and health services provisions. Thus, Dr. Scott developed Cultural Rigor as an offering of four modalities that simultaneously operationalizes Black feminism, reproductive justice, and research Justice as a framework, vision, movement, and praxis.
As an intersectional methodology, Cultural Rigor facilitates the recognition and mitigation of cultural arrogance, philanthropic redlining, epistemic injustice and community harm at the structural, institutional, disciplinary, and interpersonal level. Our vision is for the integration of Cultural Rigor methodology throughout all health and human services.
