Kind: captions
Language: en
black women are struggling with
infertility at almost two times
the rate as our caucasian brothers and
sisters
i knew when i was about 25 years old
what they kept telling me you have a
uterus full of fibroids
and so i didn't know if that was going
to impact my fertility i had just
graduated from law school
i wasn't interested in having a baby at
that point and so i kind of i didn't
have symptoms i kind of let it go on and
go on and go on
fibroids are benign tumors of muscular
and fibrous tissue
that typically develop in the walls of
the uterus
fibroids cause a disruption inside the
uterus
such that it becomes not only hard to
get pregnant it also becomes harder to
stay pregnant
black women experience miscarriages at a
much higher rate
i think it's almost always due to
fibroids
when tiffany married and was ready to
start a family
she struggled to get pregnant but did
not know where to turn for
help i think every community has that
taboo subject that thing they just don't
talk about at the dinner table
infertility is ours
i didn't have a voice i was just
struggling i'm a lawyer by trade and so
i'm used to advocating for people
but in this i couldn't advocate for
myself i didn't know how
and i had i had too much pain too much
shame and that's when i came across
fertility for color girls
it's so difficult um and it's very
difficult to be like
told this basic lie your whole life
that it's just everything's gonna work
out it really isn't
i do believe that god called me to start
fertility for colored girls to create
the safe space for women
particularly african-american women who
were struggling at insurmountable rates
because there was no place for them to
go
[Music]
i went to the meeting and i was
shocked because there were so many
black and brown women there like me who
were struggling
and it was the first time that i didn't
feel alone
we're believing and we're cheering you
on to the end
black women in particular we have
experienced
generations of oppression we carry
generations of stress it's someone that
um
says that you know this stress and this
trauma is also
cellular and it particularly impacts us
on this infertility journey
women particularly african-american
women
have experienced long-standing
social economic and environmental
stress that has really placed a burden
on their bodies in a way
that translates into more adverse
reproductive health outcomes
and that term is called weathering that
this weathering
in a way prematurely ages
black women your stress hormones
cortisol your flight or
fight hormones known as catecholamines
or epinephrine norepinephrine
those hormones actually should only be
present at low doses
overall in your general day to day and
only spike
when you truly have a new short-term
scare or anxiety for people who
find themselves in societies where
there's maybe institutional racism
structural racism
they're catecholamines and their
cortisol levels are way higher than they
should be
and so if someone is constantly under
stress
or their body is weathering that has a
lot of
long-term impacts on all your organ
systems
and over time we see that manifesting in
earlier ages of diagnosis with disease
earlier ages
of diagnosis in terms of high blood
pressure
diabetes stress related tension and even
birth outcomes in women
the black community is often described
as the most religious community in
america
and there's a big push to just pray
about it rev stacy because she's a
reverend
really kind of demystified that and said
god made the science too
i had gone through one round of ivf and
when they went in to retrieve the eggs
they could not really get to my ovaries
because
they've got these fibroids all over the
place and
upwards of 80 percent of black women
suffer from fibroids and we don't do
anything about it unless it's
life-threatening and rev stacy just
really gave me the push i needed and
and the permission to remove the
fibroids and move forward on my path to
[Music]
motherhood