A Need to Teach Others

From Advocate to Teacher

The Need for Advocacy within the Healthcare System

The first birth Tara attended was Heather’s first daughter, Luciana. She continued to attend the births of her friends and ministry partners, free of charge, advocating for them to get the humanizing care all women deserve. Fighting for humanizing care was not easy. The American medical system is ranked 55th of developed nations for maternal health outcomes, despite spending more on maternal healthcare than any other country.

One of the problems is that most medical professionals are not trained in natural birth. Because of this, Tara learned to provide the care women needed if they wanted to give birth naturally: holding their hands, informing them of options, applying counterpressure or cold rags, and of course, praying and quoting Scripture. She has become an incredible advocate because she prayerfully gave herself entirely over in service to each family she served.

Normalizing Home Birth

Based on their education and experiences in the hospital, Tara and her friends began opting for home births and learning more and more in the process. They began sharing what they had learned with the G.O.D. community. As Tara said about that time, "in the classroom and in life. We were modeling and normalizing home birth and breastfeeding for younger families coming up after them." After educating several families and attending their births, the team realized the need for care would not stop.

Realizing the great need for education, both in their own community and the communities in the third world, Tara, Heather, and Celesta began to see the great need for birth workers.

Child Birth Education at the Institute for G.O.D.

Gregg encouraged Tara to begin a childbirth education program at The Institute for G.O.D., the Bible and missions college that was established in 2004. This Childbirth Education (CBE) program trained educators and doulas in the field, combining their training with biblical education. As a result, dozens of young women were trained for birth work, equipped to teach childbirth education, and serve as doulas. But they were also Bible students who had become thoroughly convinced of God's care for the poor and marginalized in the world. As a result, women were not only served, but vulnerable women -- teen moms, immigrants, refugees, single women on fixed incomes, and more.

Childbirth Education Starts Before Pregnancy

As Tara helped Genesis navigate the changes of her adolescent years, Tara noticed a lack of educational resources for young girls. As she always does, Tara used her own experiences to learn how to better serve people around her. She created a reproductive health curriculum for young girls, titled Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. She helps girls understand the miraculous way God designed their bodies to work, reducing fear and increasing sisterhood. This curriculum has now been shared with women in El Salvador, Kenya, Uganda, India, and the Philippines. In each of these places, reproductive health is taboo. Girls are scared or ashamed of their periods because they don't understand why they're getting them (even going so far as to think they are cursed). Tara's curriculum helps break down stigmas and bring mothers and their daughters together.

If you know G.O.D. Int’l as a ministry that extends maternal health education, advocacy to families, and empowerment to girls, it all started in the work God did in Tara. Again, she obeyed.

To be continued under “NOVA Birth Services...”