Leila Chiddick interviewed professionals from around the world – and trained as a doula herself – to make recommendations on how international organizations can adjust their policies to meet the needs of people on the ground.
By Piper Bailey (UCLA 2025)
April 30, 2025, UCLA Humanities Division — When she envisioned her senior research project, Leila Chiddick never figured she’d end up learning how to be a doula.
Doulas are non-medical professionals who are trained to support people through the perinatal process, and their work became an interest of Chiddick’s for both academic and personal reasons.
As a global studies major, Chiddick learned how unaccommodating health care policies and guidelines can be for Black birthing people around the world. She also had heard family members’ stories of harrowing experiences giving birth in hospitals.
So with the support of the UCLA/Keck Humanistic Inquiry Undergraduate Research Awards program, Chiddick set out to investigate how doulas support Black women and birthing people. Her goal: to create a community-guided framework that global health organizations like the World Health Organization could adopt as part of their guidelines.
Ugo Edu, a UCLA professor of African American studies and medical anthropologist, served as Chiddick’s research adviser. Edu said Chiddick’s work has the potential to make a real impact.
“Leila’s work stands to contribute in important ways to global debates and conversations to come about regulations and the standardization of doulas’ practice, training and certification,” she said.
Many of Chiddick’s classes have — understandably — focused on policies developed by global organizations. With her project, however, Chiddick was determined to consider how smaller, local communities are impacted by those rules and guidelines.
“My work creates recommendations for how those organizations can mend the disconnect between creating the policies and the communities they are created for,” she said.
Chiddick began her project with an in-depth study of the history of doulas and the impact of international health policy on Black births. She is interviewing doulas in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania — nations she chose because of the countries’ histories of slavery and colonialism and because of how their Black populations have lacked access to supportive maternal health care.
“Making sure people feel safe and are supported when they endure the prenatal process is important,” Chiddick said. “Many times, there are high mortality rates, trauma experiences from the actual prenatal process itself, or generational trauma, or the experience of being alive in a world that doesn’t necessarily accept who you are, which perpetuates a lot of racism.”
Chiddick further immersed herself in the subject by training with DONA International, which certifies doulas, and through another organization called Birthing Advocacy Doula Training. “I feel like I can’t be doing this work on making community-based research without actually being in the community,” she said.
Edu praised Chiddick’s sophistication as a researcher.
“Leila has an extraordinary level of maturity we often see with graduate students, Edu said. “She does not shy away from challenges and hard work, and is oriented towards problem-solving and solutions while being flexible and open to learning and being pushed in her thinking.”
Chiddick, whose hometown is Charlotte, North Carolina, is set to graduate in June. As a Bruin, she has been involved with the student organization Survivors + Allies, under the auspices of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and she worked as a CARE Peer Educator. In addition to her global studies major, she’ll earn a minor in professional writing.
After graduation, Chiddick plans to work as an underwriter at an insurance company. She is already contemplating a law degree, inspired in part by what she learned through her project about the need for legal representation for survivors of sexual violence. “I hope to help people understand,” she said, “that you can go through all stages of the birthing process and experience healing.”
This article was originally published on the UCLA Humanities Division website on April 30, 2025; and republished on the International Institute website on May 2.
Published: Friday, May 2, 2025
