The Birthright

What happens when the system you were trained to trust becomes the system you can no longer stop questioning?

In The Birthright, nurse, educator, and maternal health advocate Jatu Boikai Stallings traces her journey from clinician to witness, from participant in the medical system to builder of something beyond its walls.

Blending memoir, history, social criticism, and an examination of moral injury, Stallings explores how American medicine transformed birth, marginalized generations of Black birth workers, and built institutions that continue to produce profound racial disparities in maternal health. Along the way, she confronts her own experiences inside healthcare-including the moments when she advocated, the moments when she remained silent, and the patients whose stories changed the way she understood her profession.

But The Birthright is not an argument against medicine. It is an argument for something larger: care that preserves clinical excellence without surrendering humanity, autonomy, community, or the knowledge women carry about their own bodies.

This is a book about what was taken, what survived, and what Black women are building now.

Birth was never something medicine gave us.

It was always our birthright.