For press
Press and media
Everything on this page is cleared for use. The full press release and media kit are at the foot.
Quick facts
- Created and written by
- Cheyenne Varner
- Published by
- The Educated Birth®, in partnership with The Educated Birth Foundation
- Launched
- 18 August 2026 · Richmond, Virginia
- Format
- 17 chapters across 5 acts
- Reading time
- A little over two hours end to end. Most chapters read independently in 5–10 minutes.
- Access
- Free. No account or registration required.
- Educational use
- Free to assign, share, and teach with.
- Inside
- Long-form writing, primary historical documents, archival imagery, research, federal data, and roughly two dozen interactive and visual exhibits. Every figure is cited and every chapter carries its sources.
- Topics
- Black midwifery, slavery and reproductive control, racial law, racial wealth, structural racism, criminalization and family surveillance, American gynecology, weathering and allostatic load, obstetric racism, reproductive justice, institutional and systemic harm, allyship, and individual and institutional leverage.
- Made for
- Midwives, doulas and community birth workers, clinicians, public health professionals, educators, students, reproductive justice organizations, families, and others interested in maternal and reproductive health.
- Website
- birthinginthefire.com
Descriptions
Approved descriptions at two lengths. Please use as written.
One sentence
Birthing in the Fire™ is a free digital exhibition exploring the history behind today’s Black maternal health disparities — tracing how more than four centuries of law, economics, medicine, and policy continue to shape reproductive healthcare in America.
Short description
Birthing in the Fire™ is a free digital exhibition exploring the history behind today’s Black maternal health disparities. Across seventeen chapters and five acts, it moves from Black midwifery and slavery through racial law, wealth, medicine, structural racism, and obstetric racism to the reproductive healthcare system today. Rather than ending with the history of harm, the exhibition turns toward the people carrying change forward and asks what each of us can influence from where we are.
Quotes
From the press release, cleared for use.
“I’ve felt that we have a lot of awareness without enough direction. The attention being paid to Black maternal mortality matters. But if we’re going to understand what we’re seeing now, we also need the context of how we got here — and we need somewhere useful to go with that information once we have it.”
Cheyenne Varner
“A law passed in Virginia in 1662 can feel impossibly far away from a labor and delivery unit in 2026. But when you start tracing what happened between those two points, you begin to see the threads.”
Cheyenne Varner
“I didn’t want to spend seventeen chapters showing people what happened and leave them there. I wanted the history to lead us somewhere — toward the people already doing the work and toward a question each of us can answer: From where I am, with what I have, what can I actually influence?”
Cheyenne Varner
“When I look back at my own births, I can see threads of so much of what we’re exploring in this exhibition — not because every difficult thing that happened to me was racism. But understanding the history gave me better questions to ask about why care works the way it does, who has power in a given moment, what choices are available, and what happens when individual people are operating inside much larger systems.”
Cheyenne Varner
Cheyenne Varner
Short bio
Cheyenne Varner is a reproductive health educator, writer, illustrator, health equity advocate, birth worker, and founder of The Educated Birth®. She is the creator, researcher, and author of Birthing in the Fire™.
Cheyenne Varner is a reproductive health educator, writer, illustrator, health equity advocate, birth worker, and founder of The Educated Birth®. For a decade her work has focused on making reproductive health education more representative, accessible, and grounded in the realities of people’s lives. Since entering birth work in 2016 she has developed hundreds of educational resources and illustrations used by birth workers, educators, healthcare professionals, organizations, and families across the United States and internationally.
In 2019 she wrote the Blavity essay “Stop Telling Me Black Women Die During Childbirth And Start Showing Me How We Can Thrive,” articulating an early version of a question that would become central to Birthing in the Fire™: what do we do with awareness once we have it?
Her professional work has included collaboration with medical anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis, PhD, whose dimensions of obstetric racism she illustrated for The Human Story: An Introduction to Anthropology, and with Davis and LeConté J. Dill in Anthropology News. She illustrated Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG’s SACKRED framework, featured in the CDC Museum exhibition Health Is a Human Right: Achieving Health Equity, and has illustrated findings from the Birth Place Lab’s Giving Voice to Mothers Study.
Her writing and illustrations have appeared in American Anthropologist, and she has been interviewed or featured by Refinery29, Next City, Babylist, Virginia Mercury, and Evidence Based Birth. She has spoken at the Black Maternal Health Conference from Black Mamas Matter, the Collaborative Doula Conference, the American Association of Birth Centers Birth Institute, and the National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence.
The Educated Birth®
The Educated Birth® creates teaching tools for pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum health education, designed for reproductive health professionals — birth workers, doulas, childbirth educators, public health professionals, midwives, OB-GYNs and others.
Its materials are used across all fifty US states and in more than fourteen countries, with a combined reach of more than 100,000 people, and resources are also published in Spanish. The organization publishes Everyday Birth Magazine and develops workshops, learning experiences and public projects including Birthing in the Fire™.
In 2023 the National Perinatal Task Force recognized The Educated Birth as an Official Perinatal Safe Spot for its commitment to equitable, culturally inclusive perinatal care.
Downloads
Images
The wordmark, the exhibition’s own graphics, and the author photograph in the media kit may be used in coverage of Birthing in the Fire™. Please credit The Educated Birth®.
The portraits in Chapter 17 may not be reused. Those photographs appear here with the permission of the people shown, for this exhibition only. The same holds for the archival imagery throughout: each carries its own source and rights statement beside it, and some sit under licences that do not extend to third-party use. If you need an image and aren’t sure, write first and we will sort it out.
Contact
Media and interviews
Speaking, workshops and institutional
Cheyenne Varner is available for interviews, podcasts, panels, and speaking on Black maternal health, reproductive health history, health equity, representation, and reproductive justice.