In 2017, Brad Edwards expected to become a father of twin boys. Instead, he and his partner experienced an incalculable loss, both of the babies were delivered stillborn. Edwards, like far too many men, initially compressed his feelings and buried them, but like a dam holding back a flood, eventually, he broke.
As Edwards told STLMag, he broke down in tears with his friends after talking with them about it as they watched a football game.
“I held any of the emotions I had from my experience for years, and it took one day, sitting in my basement with my friends watching football, to start having a conversation about it,” Edwards said.
“I started sobbing, and I couldn’t control my emotions. I just held everything in. I wanted to be there for my family, her family, her. I just never had the opportunity to talk and share what I was feeling and the guilt I felt from the not knowing—how I felt like I failed her and those two boys because I should have known better,” Edwards concluded.
Edwards eventually turned his pain and his tragedy into something positive, creating programs designed to support men with mental health as well as education about pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum care.
In 2020, Edwards’ work captured the attention of the St. Louis-based Dear Fathers, a platform created to share stories of Black fatherhood.
The platform had a concept in mind for Edwards, they wanted to create a mental health resource for Black folks impacted by the pandemic. Edwards agreed, and the platform’s launch coincided with his daughter Carielle’s birthday, May 18, 2020.
As Edwards told the outlet, “With [the COVID-19 pandemic], we saw there were going to be a lot more deficiencies in the Black and brown communities, and we also noticed that mental health was being talked about more than ever within the Black community,” Edwards said.
Following the success of that program, Edwards looked for additional ways to help educate Black fathers, eventually launching a free six-week program, Dads to Doulas in the summer of 2024. That program, he told STLMag, is close to his heart.
“Through my experience losing my twins, I realized that there was a lot I didn’t know, and there was a lot that I didn’t take the time to educate myself on,” Edwards said.
Edwards continued, “So by the time another opportunity came, when I was preparing to have my baby girl, I had become familiar with what a doula is. One of my good friends is a doula. I said, ‘Alright, I need you to help me create a playbook. What do I need to look for? What should her levels be? What should I be looking for with the placenta?’ So it was just a few different things I wanted to be educated on to make sure that I could be not only knowledgeable but also an advocate for her, because I know that Black women die at much higher rates (Black women die during childbirth three times more often) than any other race.”
That education ended up being critical for Edwards’ partner during the birthing process for Carielle. Although his partner didn’t necessarily want a doula as part of her plan, Edwards kept his friends who were doulas in the loop via a group chat.
As a result, Edwards said, it helped him while his partner had to return to the hospital for treatment for preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that is often characterized by high blood pressure, high levels of protein in urine, or other signs of organ damage. It is potentially fatal if left unchecked.
“I had never heard about preeclampsia or learned about it, but she (his partner) had to go back to the hospital because she was at stroke levels with preeclampsia. So my first 48 hours of my daughter being in the world when we came home, I had to do everything myself because her mom was back in the hospital with life-threatening blood-pressure issues going on,” Edwards shared.
Edwards continued, emphasizing that men become intimately involved in the birthing process.
“It’s very important for men to understand what that looks like for the mom, and how she just went through this whole traumatic situation, and that she really can’t understand why she feels the way she does because her hormones are all over the place. And that men also face postpartum depression. I think not only do we save lives in the delivery room, but we also save relationships in that postpartum phase of life.”
According to Edwards, it is vital that men, and Black men in particular, are motivated to help their partners through the birthing process.
Edwards explained, “I would love for us to be a real game-changer as it relates to health care and making sure that these families don’t ever have to suffer any of the same loss I did, if it can be avoided. I want people to understand that our shared experience should be shared. Every time I share my story with some brothers, that’s therapeutic for me. I don’t want us to be so tight-knit with our experiences that we’re not able to use that to empower not only ourselves but also someone else who needed to hear them.”
RELATED CONTENT: NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Expands Doula Services Statewide To Combat ‘Unacceptable’ Black Maternal Mortality Rate