Jamarah Amani Is Building Black Birth Justice in the South

Let me tell you about Jamarah Amani.

There’s a community midwife in Miami who takes prenatal care on the road — literally — driving a mobile clinic into the neighborhoods where Black and brown families have the fewest options and the highest stakes. Her name is Jamarah Amani, and she’s building the birth center South Florida didn’t have.

The Work

Jamarah is the Executive Director of the Southern Birth Justice Network (SBJN), a Miami-based nonprofit whose whole mission is to make midwife and doula care accessible to the people who need it most. Under her leadership, SBJN runs a mobile midwifery clinic serving majority-Black and Latino neighborhoods across Miami-Dade County.

She’s a Black, femme, queer community midwife who frames her work as a movement, not just a service. Birth justice, in her telling, is about reclaiming power — because health disparities don’t exist in a vacuum. They mirror the power disparities in society, and midwifery’s holistic, whole-family approach is how you start to shift them.

And now the network is going further: SBJN has bought a building for a freestanding birth center it aims to open in South Florida in 2027.

The Roots

Jamarah built SBJN from the ground up as a community-rooted organization — one that also trains doulas, runs a BirthTrak app, and organizes around birth justice across the South. She’s a leader in the National Black Midwives Alliance.

Her work has been recognized across the field: the Sapling Award from the Midwives Alliance of North America, the City of Miami Trailblazer Award, the Umm Salaamah Sondra Abdullah-Zaimah Birthworker Award from the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the Ms. Foundation’s Woman of Vision Award, the Miami Foundation’s Community Champion Award, and a Black Maternal Health Fellowship from Chicago Beyond.

Why You Should Know Her

Here’s why Jamarah Amani matters right now: in a country where Black women are far more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, access to a midwife who looks like you and understands your community isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s life or death.

Jamarah didn’t wait for a hospital system to solve that. She built a clinic on wheels, trained a network, and started raising a birth center — one birth, one family, one neighborhood at a time.

Quick facts:

• Executive Director, Southern Birth Justice Network (Miami)
• Community midwife & birth-justice organizer
• Runs a mobile midwifery clinic in Miami-Dade County
• Building a freestanding South Florida birth center (targeting 2027)
• Leader, National Black Midwives Alliance

Photo: Vanessa Charlot, © 2022 — via Southern Birth Justice Network (southernbirthjustice.org)