Quasheba Bey

The Beginning

A question I could not put down.

Long before the clinical training, I was a young woman asking why the women around me were not being listened to in the rooms where their bodies were being decided upon. That question became a course of study, and then a calling.

The Study

Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College.

I graduated with a BA in Gender and Women's Studies in 2012. The language I learned there, about power, about the body, about who gets believed, is still the language I bring into every birth room.

The Apprenticeship

Learning birth from the women who carry it.

Nearly a decade sits between that degree and the first clinical hours — and none of it was wasted. I spent those years in New York, inside queer, food, and reproductive justice movements, learning what it means to build community care from the ground up. I worked in program and operations roles at organizations serving women and families, did the quiet work of instructional design and community building, and along the way earned my doula training with DONA, then Ancient Song, then in full spectrum practice — holding people through labor, through loss, and through the postpartum after. I trained as a community breastfeeding educator. I studied Womb Wellness under Queen Afua. None of it was a detour. Each certification was another way of asking the same question I started with — why aren't women being listened to in the rooms where their bodies are being decided upon — and each answer prepared me for the next.

The Training

Master of Science in Midwifery, Bastyr University.

I return to school as a mother of this work, not a stranger to it. My capstone examines the evidence base for complementary and alternative medicine in preconception, the meeting place of scholarship and ancestral wisdom.

The Practice

Where the work lives now.

Today the work lives across two places: the birth room and the classroom. I hold clinical hours in home and birth center settings in Washington State, one of the strongest environments for midwifery care in the country — and I teach, because education has always been the front door into this practice. I serve families who want their care to be both clinically rigorous and culturally rooted, particularly Black and Indigenous women who have too often had to choose between the two. As I move toward licensure, this practice is also becoming something wider — a body of preconception education and community support that meets women before pregnancy even begins, so that by the time she is in labor, she has already been prepared: body, spirit, and community.