Meet
Neighborhood Birth Center
Meet Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC) and its Founder and Executive Director, Nashira Baril (pictured center). Katherine Rushfirth, NBC Policy Director (left) and Rayna Jhaveri, NBC Manager of Communications and Culture (right) also pictured.
Imagine meeting someone who feels “soft like your auntie's embrace.” Their mere presence puts your racing heart at ease. Their energy is joyful like a child’s laugh. They say, “You can trust me. I got you. I can hold everything you bring to me.’” Although you just met them, you believe them. Now imagine this person is a place. A clinic designed to rise up and meet you, to settle your nervous system, to feel like an embrace throughout your pregnancy and birth or your abortion.
This person represents the essence of what the Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC) is. NBC is an organization “birthed” and nurtured by local midwives, public health professionals, birthing people, and residents in Boston who believe that we can transform our communities by reclaiming midwifery.
Executive Director & Founder Nashira Baril’s path to leading NBC was partially rooted in her personal story as a biracial Black woman born to a line of midwives, who witnessed the home births of her siblings in the 1980s. After having her own powerful home births in 2013 and 2017, she wondered: “Globally, midwives catch the babies. And that’s what happened here historically. So how did we end up with me being the only one in my social circle who had a home birth?”
“How did we end up with me being the only one in my social circle who had a home birth?”
NBC was also born out of Nashira’s years working in maternal and child health, during which she learned that midwives in Boston had long dreamed of building a local birth center but structural challenges, particularly that most birth centers rely on substantial personal capital, had prevented its realization. Witnessing the alarming financial burden of birth centers and the hospital-led closures of several birth centers in Massachusetts, Nashira remembers reflecting on a critical question: “If we build it, will they come? And how are we going to make it?”
Nashira notes that currently 98% of births in Massachusetts take place in hospitals (MacDorman & Declerq, 2019). However, experts say that about 85% of births that take place in hospitals nationwide are low-risk and could safely happen outside of the hospital (Martina et al, 2006). In fact, several national studies show that birth center care results in positive outcomes like lower rates of c-section and preterm birth, as well as higher rates of initiated and sustained breast/chestfeeding. Yet, some still wonder why one would want to give birth outside of a hospital.
“What if the dominant birthing experience was actually one of power, not one of trauma? ”
For many like Nashira, the push comes largely from this country’s maternal health crisis, which leaves pregnant people and their children facing some of the worst birth outcomes of any high-income country. People of color are more likely to have poor experiences and health outcomes due to systems built on racism and capitalism. Nashira highlights that some may also experience the hospital setting as impersonal and cold but lack access to other options, like community birth centers or homebirth.
In the face of this, Nashira turned to hope and possibility: “What if the dominant birthing experience was actually one of power, not one of trauma? The power I feel from my birth experiences completely changes how I walk through the world.” NBC’s mission is to create one potential alternative: a birth center in Roxbury designed around the idea of “liberated birth.” For NBC, this means creating the possibility for Boston’s families to welcome new life in a setting that feels like home while being medically safe and covered by insurance.
“The power I feel from my birth experiences completely changes how I walk through the world.”
Nashira envisions “a sanctuary that rises to meet you” with soft lighting, a garden, and calming private rooms where pregnant people have the agency to give birth on their own terms, from what position to give birth in, to who is in the room. Here, highly trained birth workers who look and sound like their patients tend not only to pregnant people’s physical health, but all aspects of their wellbeing. People can also come here for other areas of midwifery care… birth control, medical abortions, gender-affirming care, and menopausal care just to name a few.
As the birth center gets closer to opening its doors, Vital CxNs is working to create a groundswell of support for diverse birth options, ensuring that when the birth center opens its doors, Boston residents will have an understanding of the services and value the center provides.
We invite you to learn more about NBC’s efforts and if their mission resonates with you, NBC asks that you help them achieve this dream by lighting your candle, sending love, and believing that Boston needs a birth center.
MacDorman MF, Declercq E. Trends and state variations in out-of-hospital births in the United States, 2004–2017. Birth. 2019;46( 2):279–288.
Martina JA, Hamilton BE, Sutton PD. Births: Final data for 2006. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2009;57.
Written by Briana Acosta (March 2025)