From the archive
1 Aug 2026
Brandi Gates-Burgess had her daughter at twenty-one, while studying at UC Riverside, and breastfed largely because she was broke. Then she learned the numbers: Black mothers in America die from pregnancy-related causes at three times the rate of white mothers, and six months of breastfeeding shifts a child's odds on diabetes, asthma, allergies and obesity. She switched her major to sociology to understand why Black birth goes wrong so often in the US.
In 2023 she founded Breast Friends Lactation in the Bay Area, pairing low-income families with lactation consultants who look like them and know from the inside what Black motherhood in America involves. The service is booked solid. She was brought into this conversation by Sandra Adler Killen, who came to nursing at fifty - her fifth career - and qualified as a lactation consultant after breastfeeding her own two children.
Killen has worked with refugee populations in Syria and Lebanon and deployed to Gaza three times, training neonatologists, paediatricians, midwives and nurses to keep infants fed through famine and mass casualty. The third voice is Dr Cindy Nelly, a midwife and global health consultant who has spent twenty-five years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza.
Nelly's first career was in environmental science; she travelled early, noticed the disparities in the places she passed through, and wanted the travelling to mean something. Her great-grandmother was a midwife, and when her own daughter was born - Nelly was twenty-three - she chose a midwife without quite knowing why, then walked out of that delivery room into the profession.
The three resist comparing suffering. What they share instead is a diagnosis: the same failure surfacing at different scales, in institutions that were never designed with the most exposed in mind, propped up by the people nearest the crisis, often unpaid and rarely heeded. Their prescription is unglamorous - get a mother breastfeeding, keep her supported for six months, and the health trajectory of a whole community moves with her.
The Breast Friends model is a match, not a programme: pair each low-income family with a lactation consultant who shares their background, and keep the support going for six months. A community centre, church or peer network can broker exactly this kind of introduction; the six months is the part that shifts the child's odds.
Bioneers · Read the source