Tatyana Ali Talks About Improving Maternity Care For Black and Indigenous Mothers

Actor, singer, and current Dancing With the Stars contestant Tatyana Ali—best known for playing Ashley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—has become a leading voice for maternal health equity. She has emerged as a prominent voice in the movement to improve maternity health outcomes for Black and Indigenous mothers and babies by confronting systemic racism and inequity in maternity care.

There’s a personal reason. Ali says she experienced “obstetric violence” during the delivery of her firstborn son, Aszi, in 2016. In an interview with NPR, she said her birth plan was ignored and she was physically restrained. “It went from a small group of people in the room to many people in the room screaming, yelling at me,” she said. “I was held down by about four people.”

Ali blames systemic racism in healthcare for what she experienced. “It wasn’t just me. I was just one tiny drop in a very, very large bucket that has been overflowing for a very, very long time,” she said.

The numbers support her. The United States has a much higher rate of maternal deaths than other wealthy nations. In 2024, 649 women in the U.S. died of maternal causes, according to the CDC. And Black mothers were more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women.

So what is Ali doing? She founded a business called Baby Yams to fund grants for Black and Indigenous birth workers and students. Baby Yams donates part of its proceeds to the Birth Future Foundation, which provides grants to midwives, doulas, and student birth workers.

“There are solutions. The solutions exist now,” Ali said. “There are birth centers, there are midwives educating themselves, doulas going into practice.” And it’s important to keep pushing for better.

“We deserve to be cared for. We deserve to have choices. We deserve to have control over our own bodies,” she said. “We are beautiful. We are deserving of loving hands.”