Actress Yaya DaCosta is using her platform to advocate for Black maternal health, drawing from her work as a doula and her own personal experiences to spark change in the prenatal space.
“I’ve been a birth worker since 2010,” DaCosta shared in a recent interview with People Magazine. During Black Maternal Health Week 2025, she participated in an online festival that tackled the Black maternal health crisis—offering space for meaningful dialogue centered on solutions and celebration.
The Lincoln Lawyer actress continued, “The most recent study has shown that since legislation and policy changes have been in the works, since doulas have been included in healthcare for people to be able to use their insurance, since all these changes have been made, the numbers of maternal mortality have decreased for white women, for Asian women, for Hispanic women, indigenous women, basically every demographic in this country — except Black women. Our numbers have worsened.”
According to the CDC’s February 2025 Health E-Stats , the maternal mortality rate for Black women in 2023 was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births—significantly higher than White (14.5), Hispanic (12.4), and Asian (10.7) women.
DaCosta believes one way to reclaim power in the birthing process is through home birth, something she personally experienced when delivering her son in 2013.
“My favorite thing is home birth because it’s just like, you can do what you want. You can play your music, you can dance, you can dim the lights, you can use all of the tools available to us, including pleasure, including your partner if they’re present in the process, understanding that there’s a correlation between the way that we get pregnant and the way that we get unpregnant.”
The former America’s Next Top Model contestant admits that “home births” are not necessarily always for everyone. “Obviously, it’s not always possible, but I think it’s possible more often than we think because of what we’ve been told,” she said.
Photo: Yaya DaCosta Instagram/Tamron Hall Show
