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Marsha Jones
Marsha Jones heads Texas only Black-led reproductive justice organization
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Marsha Jones founded and continues to head the “only Black-led, unapologetically Black-womxn centered” reproductive justice organization in Texas.
And she makes it clear that her organization’s focus includes the lesbian community and Black trans women.
“It’s been a ride,” Jones said of the 15 years since founding the organization. “It’s been quite exciting.”
The Afiya Center addresses reproductive health disparities including access to healthcare, reproductive coercion and the high maternal mortality rate among Black women in Texas compared to the population in general. A study found that, after 2010, the “reported maternal mortality rate for Texas doubled within a two-year period to levels not seen in other U.S. states.”
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CELEBRATING 15 YEARS
The Afiya Center, located at 4373 S. Hampton Road, marks 15 years of service with a gala at Gilley’s Dallas, 1135 Botham Jean Blvd., from 6-10 p.m. on Oct. 26.
Afiya Center founder and director Marsha Jones promises the event, being hosted by Cherisse Scott and featuring performances by Jeter Jones and Alex tha Great and tunes by DJ Quenn Agnes, “is going to be a wang dang doodle.”
Find more information at TheAfiyaCenter.org.
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In other words, the highest maternal death rate occurs here in Texas.
Jones is a trained doula and would like Afiya to become a birth center.
“We’re looking to get licensed to become a health and wellness center that will accommodate births,” she said. “When there’s a Black birthing team, maternal deaths decrease substantially.”
As a doula, she said, she’s assisted in at least 10 labors. Mothers came to The Afiya Center to begin labor, staying until it was time to go to the hospital to give birth. If Afiya were a birth center, she explained, the birth could instead take place there with doulas and midwives.
Jones explained the difference between a doula and a midwife: “The midwife is a medical person,” she said. “The doula advocates for you to have good care and helps with your breathing.”
As a health and wellness center, The Afiya Center schedules monthly pregnancy tests and mammograms. HIV education is also high on the center’s agenda.
“Our thing forever has been women with HIV,” Jones said. “The strategic plan for 2024 will be offering PrEP.”
A recent study shows that while Black men are offered PrEP at a higher rate than the general population, Black women are under-prescribed. Jones called that missed opportunities to prevent the spread of HIV.
“Many women could benefit,” she said. “Sex workers, women in violent relationships. Are we getting PrEP to the Black women who can use it most?”
One of The Afiya Center’s programs is rental assistance that includes help in paying other bills for women living with HIV.
“The rent we pay for them that one time is the difference,” Jones said.
She echoes what other HIV organizations have said when she notes that “Housing is HIV prevention.” When someone living with HIV has stable housing, they’re more likely to remain compliant on their medication and thus remain undetectable and unlikely to spread the virus.
Jones said members of her team were down in Austin this year during the regular legislative session talking to legislators about Medicaid expansion and how that would address the maternal death rate among Black women.
“If folks stay in care for one year after birth, that decreases maternal mortality,” she said. “Hold them in our space for 13 months, and we have healthy outcomes for mom and baby.”
For all of her passion about healthcare for Black women, Jones said, her background is in accounting. “I left the corporate world when I saw my friends dying of AIDS,” she explained, adding that she was horrified by the way the Black church was treating people with HIV.
Between 2005 and 2007, she received a fellowship with the Black AIDS Institute where she said she realized what was happening to Black women. “No one was taking care of Black women with HIV,” she said.
She said she learned about reproductive justice and “the entire lived experience.”
“You and your family — however you define it — have a right to live without violence,” she said. “And how we treat folks with trans experience?
We should be ashamed of ourselves.”
And giving women the chance to claim that right, she said, is The Afiya Center’s mission.
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