In this episode, host Michelle Browder sits down with Rose for a raw, generous conversation about the realities of pregnancy and early motherhood. Rose opens up about the anxiety that gripped her throughout her pregnancy — the fear of becoming another statistic — and the deliberate, careful process of finding an OB-GYN who would actually listen to her. That search carries extra weight given her own family history: her grandfather, Dr. Robert Williams, was one of the only Black OBs serving rural Alabama, delivering over 7,000 babies across Bullock and Macon Counties — a legacy strangers still stop Rose to talk about today.

Rose walks through her full birth story, from a long induction to an unplanned C-section, and doesn't shy away from the harder chapters that followed: the challenges of breastfeeding, the mental load of postpartum motherhood, and a terrifying medical emergency that sent her newborn son to Birmingham on a life flight. The conversation also turns to the state of maternal healthcare in Alabama today — hospital closures, the shrinking number of OB-GYNs in rural counties, and the growing case for midwifery and home birth as women search for care they can trust.

Honest, funny, and deeply human, this episode is a reminder that behind every statistic on maternal health is a real story — and a real family fighting to be heard.

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For the first time, Michelle Browder turns the mic on herself. In this solo episode — celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Mothers of Gynecology Monument and the tenth anniversary of More Than Tours — Michelle traces the full arc of how she got here: leaving her "best life" in Atlanta to answer her mother's call back to Montgomery in 2002, turning a run-down café into a safe haven for the city's young people, and the professional humiliation during COVID that sent her into a depression — and, unexpectedly, straight to a horse stable, where the idea for the monument was born.

She walks through it all: dropping out of the Art Institute of Atlanta after a professor called her portfolio "too black," discovering Robert Thom's postcard-sized painting of J. Marion Sims that changed the course of her life at 19, teaching herself to weld in a San Francisco shop during the pandemic, and the five-year sprint from sketch to sculpture that led to Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey standing in Montgomery today. Along the way, she gives credit where it's due — to early believers like Gloria Steinem and the Packard Foundation, to partners like Charles Johnson and Dr. Aletha Maybank, and to a memorable tour she gave to Governor Gavin Newsom that helped move real legislation for doulas and midwives.

Equal parts vulnerable, hilarious, and hard-won, this episode is the origin story behind the movement — told, for once, entirely in her own words.

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In this impromptu spotlight episode, Michelle Browder reunites in Montgomery with two women from the University of Michigan who first hosted her three years earlier: Dana L. Thomas, MPH, Director of the Adolescent Health Initiative at Michigan Medicine, and Dr. Tonya Kneff-Chang, a critical and interdisciplinary historian who leads campus history tours confronting the university's own hidden histories — from a Native American land treaty plaque no one had ever noticed, to the University of Michigan Museum of Art's copy of Robert Thom's 1952 painting of J. Marion Sims, the so-called "father of gynecology," and the enslaved women — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — he experimented on without anesthesia.

The conversation traces a genuinely full-circle story: how Michelle's Mothers of Gynecology monument found its way into a University of Michigan medical school classroom, how one student used her work to teach a room full of future clinicians about intersectionality, and how that same classroom experience led Dana and Tonya straight to Montgomery — to the actual site of the former Negro Women's Hospital where Sims once treated his subjects. Along the way, the three dig into cultural memory sites, the deliberate placement (and erasure) of monuments across the Deep South, and what it means to hold grief and reverence in the same breath.

Learn more about the Mothers of Gynecology monument at www.anarchalucybetsey.org

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