Celebrating Birth as a Community Issue at the Cincinnati Museum Center’s Advancing Health Exhibit
This past weekend, we had the immense honor of being invited to the Cincinnati Museum Center to showcase our work at Nurture as part of the Advancing Health exhibit. This exhibit celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Cincinnati leaders and innovators in healthcare, highlighting how our city has shaped medical advancements and improved public health. It was an absolute privilege to represent pregnancy, postpartum care, and the innovations we’re making in women’s health at Nurture—especially as the very first organization to spotlight childbirth in this powerful space.
At Nurture, we’re passionate about advancing women’s health and expanding choices in childbirth. This event was a unique opportunity to share our mission with the wider community. Our incredible doulas were there to answer questions, connect with families, and offer insight into the childbirth and postpartum journey.
One of the biggest highlights was our childbirth educator doll, a wonderful hands-on tool that shows the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience in a way that’s easy to understand and explore. This doll demonstrates not only vaginal birth but also cesarean births and VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean), and it even includes a placenta and breastfeeding snaps to show how babies latch onto their mothers for nursing. Watching museum-goers interact with the doll—especially curious kids learning how babies are born—was truly special. They could see and understand birth in a way that made it accessible, fun, and educational.
At Nurture, we’re passionate about advancing women’s health and expanding choices in childbirth. This event was a unique opportunity to share our mission with the wider community. Our incredible doulas were there to answer questions, connect with families, and offer insight into the childbirth and postpartum journey.
We also had coloring pages with birth affirmations and body positivity messages, which both kids and parents enjoyed. It was amazing to see families sitting together, coloring, and having conversations about birth, bodies, and babies. For many of them, it was the first time they’d ever engaged with birth as a topic outside of their own personal experience.
But what truly moved me was hearing families openly discussing birth as a community issue—not just a women’s issue. That’s such a crucial part of the work we do at Nurture. Birth impacts all of us. When we provide holistic support during the perinatal journey—through services like birth and postpartum doulas, prenatal education, postpartum care, breastfeeding support, mental health resources, and more—we don’t just improve outcomes for women. We improve outcomes for everyone: women, children, partners, and the entire community.
The event at the Cincinnati Museum Center was a powerful reminder of this. I saw parents sharing bits of their own birth stories with their kids and each other, sparking conversations that felt both meaningful and long overdue. It was truly magical.
We are incredibly grateful to the Cincinnati Museum Center for inviting us to share our vision for maternal care and supporting our mission to improve health outcomes and choices in childbirth. It was such a privilege to be part of an exhibit that recognizes birth as a vital, communal experience, and we look forward to continuing to foster these conversations.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this event, and to the museum for believing in the work we do. Together, we can reshape how birth is understood, supported, and celebrated in our community.
By your side,
