For decades, we’ve known Tatyana Ali as Ashley Banks on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” but behind her TV career and bright smile lies a harrowing reality from her private life: the traumatic birth of her son. Now, she’s speaking out about the experience of birthing while Black.
On the April 27 episode of “Pod Meets World” podcast, Ali described her harrowing childbirth experience in September 2016 when giving birth to her first baby, Edward—named after his great grandfather, a Los Angeles based swing conductor and composer. From the beginning, she said her birth plan “wasn’t followed” by the doctors despite having a “really healthy pregnancy.”
As she put it, her birth plan “changed once we got into the hospital” when doctors “pushed him back inside me” despite baby Edward being “all the way crowned.”
The 47-year-old, who also shares a six-year-old son Alejandro with her husband Vaughn Rasberry, called what doctors did in that moment “incredibly dangerous. […] They could have snapped his neck. But this is after hours of them holding me down, not allowing me to move.”
“When it was time to push, I wanted to get onto my hands and knees. […] But every time I tried, the five people screaming at me would push me back down onto my back,” she testified during a Committee on Oversight and Reform in May 2021. “One doctor climbed onto the side of the bed and pushed his forearm into my belly so hard that I could still feel the pain days later. […] They used a suction, a plunger type apparatus, and tried four times, the suction aggressively popped off of his head again and again. I knew instinctively that they would hurt my baby irreparably if this circus continued. They had medicalized my healthy labor to a point of no return.”
Therefore, she agreed to undergo a C-section.
She went on to describe the care she received during her delivery as “obstetric violence,” adding, “There are people… [who] have sued for almost the identical thing that happened to me and won.”
At the time, her newborn had to spend time in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) due to complications Ali attributed to his delivery. “He couldn’t pee on his own for a long time, about five or six days,” she said.
She added how a pediatric urologist confirmed her worst fear. “Actually, it was a pediatric urologist who is the only one who came to my side and said, ‘I saw what happened during your birth, the things that resulted in this emergency C-section.’ She said, ‘I think the traumatic nature of his birth is what is causing this.’”
Ali has since turned the experience into an opportunity to advocate for people who look like her in the delivery room. “Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth,” she told so-host Danielle Fischel. “And I think a lot of times people go, ‘Oh, well, those are other health risks and other whatever.’” But other health risks are not always the case, and the disturbing numbers are causing real fear.
“Many are now scared to start families because they know that we are dying in hospitals,” Ali said during testimony. “We don’t have to lose anyone else. We need to be heard and we need to be believed.”
