Connect with us

Business

Helping Women Survive Birth in a Pandemic

Published

on

Helping Women Survive Birth in a Pandemic

As a part of a weekly collection on adjustments within the office for girls, we’re profiling those that stepped up at a second of disaster and stuffed gaps within the labor market throughout the pandemic.

On a quiet, frigid Sunday afternoon, Sarah Bowers, a 25-year-old social employee nicely into the third trimester of her first being pregnant, advised the three girls gathered in her tidy house in south New Jersey that she was dreading having to offer beginning on the hospital.

The hospital the place she was scheduled was triggering for her, she mentioned. She had spent six years out and in of that very same establishment as the first caretaker for her mom, who was identified with colon most cancers in 2012 and died in 2018.

“OK, so the hospital is already not supplying you with good vitality,” mentioned Niulquie McKinney, a doula and midwife who’s fondly recognized in her neighborhood as Nili and whose serene and measured demeanor makes her appear far older than her age of 34. She and her group — Evana Cooper, a doula, and Asma Shakour, a doula-in-training — had been serving to Ms. Bowers draw up a beginning plan that may assist hold her calm. They demonstrated respiratory workouts and mentioned whether or not to carry candles to the supply room.

For Ms. McKinney, empowering pregnant folks is the motivation behind her work. She turned a doula in 2019 and, in early 2020, simply earlier than the pandemic, she enrolled in a program to develop into a licensed midwife, which might enable her to carry out vaginal exams, monitor very important indicators and ship infants, significantly in house beginning conditions. She additionally based the Foremothers Beginning Providers company, which is meant to assist low-income, marginalized girls not simply survive childbirth but in addition go into the birthing expertise with their eyes huge open.

Advertisement

When the pandemic upended the well being care trade in March 2020, leaving pregnant girls frightened and weak, it solely highlighted for Ms. McKinney how important her work was and the way a lot of a distinction she may make.

Within the first months of the pandemic, doulas — who usually present essential help within the birthing course of — had been sidelined. In some states, they had been barred from getting into supply rooms with pregnant girls as a part of Covid restrictions. As particular person hospitals started adopting completely different insurance policies for doula assist, it created a labyrinthine system of paperwork for doulas to navigate. Some hospitals demanded particular doula certifications, whereas others wouldn’t let doulas go away the premises as soon as they’d been admitted, even when a lady’s labor prolonged over a number of days. Many ladies determined to go for house births or birthing facilities, making a surge in demand for each doulas and midwives.

Ms. McKinney, whereas nonetheless learning to be a midwife, jumped in to volunteer at beginning facilities that had been overwhelmed and understaffed, choosing up hands-on coaching alongside the way in which.

The pandemic “was a scary and unpredictable time,” she mentioned. “However I felt as if I had an obligation to be on the market.”

Ms. McKinney entered the sphere in 2018 after going by two births herself — experiences that left her cautious of the broader well being care trade. Along with her first youngster, in 2016, her physician prompt she have a cesarean part — a suggestion, she mentioned, that took her aback, given what she understood concerning the circumstances of her being pregnant.

Advertisement

“No pre-eclampsia, no gestational diabetes, I felt nice,” she mentioned, including that the physician didn’t talk his thought course of along with her. “To this present day, I proceed to ask myself: Why would he even ask me that?”

In 2018, she was pregnant with twins, which might be thought-about a high-risk being pregnant. When she went into labor early, her medical group responded with a number of interventions that she didn’t welcome. Once more, she felt disregarded.

“I used to be shortly admitted and instantly strapped down,” she recalled. “I felt defeated.”

Advertisement

Shortly after giving beginning, whereas recovering at house in New Jersey, she noticed a TV advert encouraging folks to take free courses to develop into neighborhood doulas. Beginning doulas usually present girls with useful data and wellness suggestions throughout their pregnancies, in addition to put together them emotionally and bodily for what to anticipate throughout and after childbirth. Although doulas will not be licensed as medical personnel, they’ve, lately, develop into an more and more fashionable antidote to America’s usually fraught maternal well being care system, appearing as shock-absorbing touchstones of calm throughout a number of the most weak days of a lady’s life.

The advert prompted Ms. McKinney to enroll in doula coaching. “What drew me to it, actually, was the information that I assumed I’d obtain,” she mentioned. “I assumed that I used to be going to be taught and possibly keep away from any additional trauma for myself.”

She’s since discovered that, in her apply as each a doula and a midwife, she’s found her goal. “I feel she’s had it in her soul for some time to be a midwife,” mentioned Trinisha Williams, the previous director of the Brooklyn Birthing Heart, who turned a mentor to Ms. McKinney when she began volunteering. From the primary time they met, initially of the pandemic, Ms. Williams mentioned, Ms. McKinney appeared as if she knew precisely what she was doing and had been working in maternal well being care for a very long time.

Virtually 90 p.c of Ms. McKinney’s greater than 100 shoppers are members of low-income communities, and so they usually use Medicaid to pay for her companies. With Ms. Bowers, the group thought-about providing free house birthing companies, which aren’t lined by Medicaid in New Jersey. Ultimately, she delivered within the hospital with the doula, Ms. Cooper, by her facet.

-Ms. McKinney and her group verify in recurrently with their shoppers for as much as a 12 months after beginning, partially due to the heightened risks of bodily and psychological postpartum problems inside at-risk communities. Ms. McKinney and her employees recurrently textual content or name new moms, even taking them out to lunch or espresso. Many occasions, they carry contemporary cooked meals to their shoppers’ houses or have one thing nourishing delivered to them. They usually develop into their confidants and mates.

Advertisement

“We really feel a reference to the infants and households. We’ve been invited to weddings and birthday events,” Ms. McKinney mentioned. “Once we do our check-ins, it’s extra like, ‘Oh, your auntie so-and-so came around!’”

In January, the Foremothers group visited Andrea Ross, a shopper in Philadelphia who had given beginning to her son, Zackai, six months prior. Ms. Ross delivered her son by an emergency C-section, which had not been her hoped-for expertise. Whereas watching Ms. McKinney’s group play with Zackai, Ms. Ross was in a position to lastly open up about his beginning and discuss by that emotionally charged second.

As grueling, time consuming and emotional because the work might be, Ms. McKinney says every beginning she has facilitated seems like “a step towards my very own therapeutic.”

“Little did I do know that the work itself could be therapeutic,” she mentioned. “That second when the newborn is born actually makes up for lots of ache.”

This collection is a part of a expertise partnership with Google Pixel exploring the journalistic functions of smartphone images.

Advertisement

The Instances maintains full editorial independence. Expertise companions don’t have any management over the reporting or modifying course of and don’t overview tales earlier than publication.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Business

Amazon Prime Will Release a Melania Trump Documentary

Published

on

Amazon Prime Will Release a Melania Trump Documentary

Amazon said on Sunday that its Prime Video streaming service would release a “behind the scenes” documentary about Melania Trump’s life.

The film will head to movie theaters and stream on Amazon Prime in the second half of this year, the company said in a statement. Mrs. Trump will be an executive producer of the documentary, which started filming in December, the month after her husband, Donald J. Trump, won the presidential election.

Amazon said it was “excited to share this truly unique story.”

The company and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, had a rocky relationship with Mr. Trump during Mr. Trump’s first presidential term. But in recent months, Amazon and Mr. Bezos have taken steps to repair it. The tech giant said last month that it would donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund, joining Meta and executives of some other Silicon Valley companies in writing checks to the inaugural committee. Mr. Bezos has said he is “very optimistic” about Mr. Trump’s new term in office and is eager to work with his administration on reducing regulation.

During his first presidential term, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Bezos because of his newspaper’s political coverage and questioned whether the U.S. Postal Service was charging Amazon too little for shipping. Amazon, in turn, accused Mr. Trump of using “improper pressure” on the Pentagon to deny the company a cloud-computing contract.

Advertisement

Amazon now appears to be eager to turn the page.

In October, The Post said it would stop endorsing presidential candidates, a decision made by Mr. Bezos, and did not publish an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris that had already been drafted. Mr. Bezos defended his decision, saying newspaper endorsements “create a perception of bias.”

Last week, Ann Telnaes, a Post cartoonist, said she was resigning after the paper’s opinion section rejected a cartoon that showed Mr. Bezos and three other technology executives bending the knee to a statue of Mr. Trump while offering the president-elect bags of money. David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor, said the cartoon was rejected because the section had published a column on the same subject and had already scheduled another one for publication. He said he had asked Ms. Telnaes to rescind her resignation, saying, “The only bias was against repetition.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the efforts by the company and Mr. Bezos to forge closer ties to Mr. Trump. The Trump transition team also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mrs. Trump has recently shown more willingness to share details about her life with the public. Last year, she published a memoir that described her career as a model, marriage to Mr. Trump and time in the White House. It became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. Her role as executive producer of the documentary suggests that she will have some influence over how it depicts her life.

Advertisement

Brett Ratner, a director and producer behind movies like “Rush Hour” and “The Revenant,” will direct the documentary. Mr. Ratner has kept a lower profile in recent years after questions were raised about his behavior. In 2011, he resigned as co-producer of the Oscars broadcast after he used an anti-gay slur at a public event. In 2017, Mr. Ratner was accused of sexual misconduct by six women in an article published by The Los Angeles Times, claims that he denied.

Amazon, which will have exclusive rights to the movie about Mrs. Trump, said it would reveal more details on the project as filming progressed and it completed release plans.

Continue Reading

Business

Brett Ratner directs Melania Trump documentary on Prime Video

Published

on

Brett Ratner directs Melania Trump documentary on Prime Video

Director Brett Ratner is back behind the camera again for a new documentary on Melania Trump, his first film since facing allegations of sexual harassment raised nearly a decade ago by several female associates, including actor Olivia Munn.

The documentary, which has been licensed by Amazon Prime Video, will be released later this year in theaters and also on the streaming platform. The film is produced by Fernando Sulichin (New Element Media) and Trump.

“We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” Amazon said in a statement Sunday.

Amazon and a representative for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why Ratner was picked as director for the film or past sexual harassment allegations against him. Ratner is best known for his films “Rush Hour,” “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “The Family Man.”

In an interview with ABC News in 2018, the then-first lady said that when people accused others of harassment they needed to provide proof.

Advertisement

“You cannot just say to somebody, ‘I was sexually assaulted, or you did that to me,’ because sometimes the media goes too far and the way they portray some stories — it’s not correct, it’s not right,” she told the news outlet.

Sexual harassment and misconduct allegations against Ratner were reported by The Times in 2017. The allegations included a model who said she was forced to perform oral sex on Ratner and an actor who said she saw Ratner masturbating and ejaculating when she came into his trailer.

Ratner’s attorney, Martin Singer, disputed the accounts to The Times in 2017.

“I have represented Mr. Ratner for two decades, and no woman has ever made a claim against him for sexual misconduct or sexual harassment,” Singer wrote to The Times in 2017. “Furthermore, no woman has ever requested or received any financial settlement from my client.”

After The Times reported on the allegations, Ratner experienced a setback in his career.

Advertisement

In 2017, Warner Bros. severed ties with the embattled filmmaker and said it would not renew its production deal with Ratner. At the same time, the Diageo liquor company discontinued Ratner’s whiskey brand, Hillhaven Lodge, named after the director’s Beverly Hills estate.

In 2017, Ratner sued a woman who’d accused him of rape for defamation. He dropped the lawsuit in 2018.

Meanwhile, Amazon — which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who recently met with President-elect Donald Trump — has told the Associated Press that it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and will carry the Jan. 20 ceremony on its streaming platform, which is considered an in-kind donation worth an additional $1 million.

Times staff writer Amy Kaufman and night archiving supervisor Valerie Hood contributed to this report.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Business

The Fallout From the End of the U.S. Steel Deal

Published

on

The Fallout From the End of the U.S. Steel Deal

President Biden is set to officially block Nippon Steel’s $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel as soon as Friday, most likely putting an end to an industrial megadeal that ran up against widespread political opposition.

But the decision could set off a cascade of consequences, including whether it would dissuade foreign investment in key industries, even from crucial U.S. allies like Japan. There’s one near-certainty: Expect a lot of litigation.

The deal’s demise seemed increasingly inevitable. In March, Biden said it was “vital” that U.S. Steel remained American-owned. The United Steelworkers’ union opposed the transaction from the start, questioning Nippon Steel’s commitment to maintaining the American company’s production and unionized employment levels. (That U.S. Steel is headquartered in Pennsylvania, a crucial election battleground state, escaped no one’s notice.)

Last month, the federal government panel, known as CFIUS, that reviewed the deal on national security grounds expressed concern that the Japanese suitor’s global business considerations could eventually outweigh any commitments it made to preserve U.S. Steel production levels.

President-elect Donald Trump also pledged to block the takeover once he took office.

Advertisement

Others have worried that blocking the deal could chill foreign investment. In recent days, some senior Biden advisers warned that rejecting the transaction could damage relations with Japan, The Washington Post reported.

Japanese officials pressed Biden to approve the deal. Rejecting it “will send a stark message that investment from Japan, regardless of lack of security concerns, is not welcome in the U.S.,” Takehiko Matsuo, a senior trade minister, wrote to Biden administration officials last month.

The matter will probably head to court. Nippon Steel has complained of the White House’s “impermissible influence” in the CFIUS process. That lays the groundwork for the Japanese company or U.S. Steel to sue over Biden’s expected move.

DealBook also wonders whether the companies would sue each other, perhaps citing a failure to do enough to win approval. (The deal agreement requires Nippon Steel to pay its American counterpart $565 million if regulators block the transaction.)

What next for U.S. Steel? The company’s C.E.O., David Burritt, has warned that the steel maker needs investment to upgrade its aging plants. Even CFIUS acknowledged that the company had a “history of inadequate attempts to improve its competitiveness.”

Advertisement

One possibility is another bidder — such as Cleveland-Cliffs, which had been previously rebuffed by U.S. Steel and whose stock has been under pressure — could swoop in. But there’s bad blood between Burritt and his Cleveland-Cliffs counterpart, raising the question of whether U.S. Steel investors would need to heap on the pressure to get a deal done.

Mike Johnson faces a nail-biter vote on Friday for House speaker. Johnson has the backing of President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but is hampered by a razor-thin majority and a fractious House Republican conference. Corporate America will closely watch the vote’s outcome for what it says about the chamber’s ability to pass legislation once Trump takes office.

The authorities identify the driver of the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion. The man was an Army master sergeant on leave from active duty, who killed himself immediately before the rented Tesla detonated outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. The F.B.I. said it had found no link between the incident and the deadly New Orleans rampage hours earlier involving an Army veteran.

China places trade restrictions on dozens of U.S. companies. The Ministry of Commerce announced on Thursday that export-control limits would be put on 28 companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The move comes just weeks before Trump takes office, and will probably escalate a trade war between Washington and Beijing. More shots could be fired soon: The Biden administration is weighing a ban on Chinese-made drones.

At any other car company, the sales numbers announced by Tesla on Thursday would have been a catastrophe. Deliveries for the year fell slightly in a growing market, the first annual decline in the company’s history.

Advertisement

Yet the reaction on Wall Street was relatively muted when compared to the huge rally in Tesla’s share price in recent months, The Times’s Jack Ewing writes for DealBook. That reflects how much Elon Musk has sold investors on the idea that the cars are a piece of a much bigger vision that includes self-driving taxis and humanoid robots — and his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump.

Shares closed down but the stock is up more than 55 percent since Election Day. Musk’s relationship with Trump has given him a direct line to the White House that he can use to promote his business interests.

“Investors have shifted,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, told DealBook. “They thought of it as an E.V. company. Now they think of it as a technology platform. ‘What will Elon think of next?’”

Musk has revealed little detail about his plans. During conference calls with investors and analysts, he has focused on what he says will be trillions of dollars in revenue from self-driving taxis that are probably years away from mass production.

Yet Musk may find it difficult to realize his grand visions if the company keeps losing market share to rivals such as General Motors, BMW and BYD. (The Chinese car maker reported record sales in 2024.)

Advertisement

Does Musk need to accelerate plans for a lower-cost Tesla? He told investors in October that the company would begin selling a car this year that would cost substantially less than a Model 3 sedan, which starts at $42,500 before state and federal incentives.

But Musk has sounded ambivalent about the new vehicle, calling it “pointless” unless it’s capable of driving autonomously. And Tesla has not displayed a prototype yet.

That has led to speculation that Musk is not that interested in mass-market cars anymore. “What excites Musk is the technology for the day after tomorrow,” Gordon said. “An econobox E.V. just doesn’t ring his bell.”

One thing to watch in 2025: Musk’s reaction if car sales remain tepid and Tesla shares fall further. Would that prompt him to deploy more of the skills he used to build Tesla into the world’s largest maker of electric cars?


A federal appeals court has knocked down one of President Biden’s biggest tech policy accomplishments: the F.C.C.’s net neutrality rules on broadband internet providers that sought to safeguard consumers’ access to online content.

Advertisement

The dismantling comes as companies brace for the incoming Trump administration to usher in a new era of deregulation, and further limit regulatory reach.

The decision is a win for cable and telecom companies such as AT&T and Comcast, ending a two-decade effort to regulate them like utilities. It also shows the impact of a recent Supreme Court ruling that is expected to limit federal agencies’ power.

A recap: The regulations, which have been championed by Google, Facebook and Netflix, were put in place under the Obama administration amid concern that internet service providers could become de facto gatekeepers with the power to slow or block access to content. The rules were revoked during the first Trump term, only to be reinstated by the F.C.C. in April.

Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the F.C.C., has been a vocal critic of the rules.

The ruling could inspire other legal challenges. It relies on the Supreme Court’s upending last year of the Chevron doctrine requiring courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous statutes. “The F.C.C.,” Judge Richard Allen Griffin wrote, “lacks the statutory authority to impose its desired net-neutrality policies.”

Advertisement

Tim Wu, a former Biden administration official who coined the term “net neutrality,” slammed the decision, calling it “blatant judicial activism that puts corporate interests over American democracy.”

What’s next? The fight over net neutrality isn’t over: The decision doesn’t affect state laws, including those in California, Washington and Colorado. And Democrats at the F.C.C. called on Congress to enshrine net neutrality into law. Still, many commentators note that net neutrality isn’t the hot-button consumer issue it had once been.

“The market no longer thinks it’s a big deal and hasn’t for a while,” Blair Levin, a former chief of staff to the F.C.C., told The Times.


In the latest sign of how Big Tech is repositioning itself for the new Trump administration, Meta has tapped a prominent Republican to head its global policy team.

Joel Kaplan, a longtime Meta employee and a deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush, will take over from Nick Clegg, as first reported by Semafor.

Advertisement

Meta has tried to take itself out of the political spotlight. Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain, joined the tech giant when the company was facing fierce blowback, including for its handling of disinformation on its platform during the 2016 election.

He’s credited with smoothing relations with regulators, especially in Washington and Brussels.

Could his leftish politics have become a liability? Clegg may have been planning his exit before the election, but he didn’t hide his opinions. Last month, he warned that Elon Musk, whose X and xAI compete with Meta, could become a “political puppet master” and criticized Musk’s stewardship of X.

The remarks came as many businesses worry about retribution from President-elect Donald Trump and Musk — and as Big Tech C.E.O.s have gone out of their way to curry favor with them.

Kaplan’s deep Republican roots could help Meta in the new Trump era. He joined Facebook in 2011, and later served as Clegg’s deputy. Before that, he clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and is a close friend of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (He appeared at Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, and later apologized to Meta employees who thought his presence showed a political preference).

Advertisement

He has also been one of the loudest voices inside Meta pushing against restrictions on political content.

Mark Zuckerberg has largely turned away from politics. For years, the tech mogul publicly campaigned for liberal causes but has shifted after coming under sustained fire. Trump criticized Zuckerberg and threatened to put him in jail after accusing Meta of censoring conservative views.

But Zuckerberg, like other Big Tech leaders, has made efforts to court Trump, having traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet the president-elect after the November election.

Deals

  • Several prominent hedge funds — including Millennium, D.E. Shaw, Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel — reported double-digit returns last year. (Reuters)

  • Hindenburg Research, the activist short-seller, announced a bet against Carvana, accusing the used-car sales platform of accounting manipulation. (CNBC)

Politics and policy

Advertisement
  • President-elect Donald Trump picked Ken Kies, a longtime tax lobbyist for clients including Microsoft, as the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy. (Bloomberg)

  • “How Silicon Valley won a powerful House committee” (Politico)

Best of the rest

  • The U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, called for cancer warnings to be placed on alcoholic beverages; doing so would require Congress to act, however. (NYT)

  • Richard Easterlin, an economist whose work challenged the assumption that more money always leads to more happiness, died Dec. 16. He was 98. (NYT)

  • “The Rise Of Big Potato” (The Lever)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

Continue Reading

Trending