For the Love of a Child : Determined to keep babies from dying, Kathryn Hall pairs ‘sister-friends’ with pregnant women who have nowhere else to turn.

A pair of laughing 16-year-olds wanders into the office, arms around each other’s shoulders. One girl is pregnant. “We live near each other, go to school together, but we never met until the Birthing Project,” the pregnant one tells a reporter. “Now they’d have to tear us apart,” giggles the other. For 14 years, Kathryn Hall used the term infant mortality and thought she knew what it meant.

She was, after all, a public health administrator who oversaw millions of dollars of state funds.

Then she held a dead baby in her arms for the first time.

He was an infant who need not have died. But his mother was alone, poor, diabetic and often too sick to get to the clinic by bus.

Hall, who heard about the woman through a public health nurse, drove to her house and took her to the clinic. But it was already too late. The baby, in extreme respiratory distress, had to be delivered by Cesarean section. He underwent brain surgery and remained on life support until he died 10 days later.

Even had he lived, he might have faced a hostile world. “We’re spending $200,000 on this child, and he’s probably going to grow up and mug me,” one of his doctors had said.

Determined to cushion children against such hostility, and never forgetting the despair of that day in March, 1988, when she cradled the lifeless baby, Hall knew something must be done.

“Just like the word pregnancy never seems real until you feel life, infant mortality isn’t real until you feel death.”

Kathryn Hall had worried about the infant death rate for years. As a state administrator, she was angered by the “astonishing statistics” about black babies in California.

“They die at twice the rate of white babies, their birth weights are lower than all the rest,” she says. Worse yet, it seemed that policy makers had begun to take the statistics for granted.

“I heard them say things like ‘maybe black babies just naturally die more, just naturally have lower weights.’ As a black woman and mother, I was outraged that this was accepted as a given in the health-care community. I did not think it had to be that way. Those assumptions were not OK with me.”

In winter, 1988, she shifted into high gear with her plan to help “grow healthy black babies.”

She would start “an underground railroad” of her own, she decided, to move women away from high risk and into healthier pregnancies.

Hall invited “the 10 toughest, most together black women in Sacramento”--and one male health care expert--into her living room. It was a diverse clan of volunteers--corporate executives, women in the arts and state employees.

Each volunteer was paired with a pregnant woman whose name Hall had gotten from a social service agency.

And the Birthing Project began.

Today, the more than 200 volunteers call themselves “sister-friends” because each offers the love and care of a family member or best friend. The pregnant women are “little sisters.”

Each sister-friend maintains daily contact, helps find anything that’s needed, makes sure doctor’s appointments are kept and medicines are taken.

Sister-friends are present at each baby’s birth, to welcome children into a world that values them. “We do not want any baby greeted with hostility in a world that believes it should not have been born,” Hall explains.

Volunteers see the mother and child until the end of the baby’s first year--and ideally, for the rest of their lives.

“We did not go into this because we love babies, but because we love healthy, caring adults,” Hall explains. “And the way to grow those adults is to love them and treat them well from the moment they’re conceived.”

At 8:30 on a recent morning, the sparsely furnished Birthing Project office hums with activity. There are not enough desks or chairs for the five paid workers and the drop-in volunteers. The copier machine isn’t working, the two phone lines are ringing.

“We’re still $30,000 short and we haven’t the foggiest idea how we’ll pay the year’s rent,” Hall says. “There’s no bathroom tissue left,” a worker reports.

All is chaos, it would seem.

But not for Marianne. Angelic and pale, with a long tangle of blond hair, she croons contentedly to the 3-month-old baby in her arms: “Miss Kathryn is your grandma. Miss Kathryn loves us both. Everybody loves us here. This is now our home.”

The little song continues until the baby’s eyes close and Marianne herself can rest. She has already had a tough morning to overhear Hall tell it.

But Hall, 43, won’t talk directly to the reporter hanging around. “There are lots of things this project needs, but publicity isn’t one of them,” says the slim woman in black, her hair pulled back like a ballerina’s.

“Clients may not be interviewed because it intrudes on their privacy and dignity,” she adds quickly.

And personal publicity is anathema: “This project is not about me. It is about each woman who takes responsibility for helping another. It is about community involvement and unconditional love,” she says, trying to sound really tough. But her gentleness shines through as she worries that she’s been rude: “OK, you can hang out.”

Later, she agrees to talk about Marianne.

“She grew up in group homes, never knew what love meant. When she got pregnant and came to us, we became her family. We touched her tummy, talked to the baby inside, put responsibility on that unborn child to keep its mother off of drugs. And it worked. Marianne stayed clean because she focused on that baby to the exclusion of everything else.

“We were there with her through labor, we caught the baby when she was born.”

When Hall learned Marianne was in a crack house that morning, “I went right over there. The (drug dealer) said ‘How dare you come here?’ I told him ‘I’m her mother and this is my baby and I’m taking them out--it’s just that simple.’ He couldn’t fight with that. If I’d said I’m a social worker or a policeman, the outcome would have been different. But he understood I was performing a mother’s role. And I am her spiritual mother, which is why she didn’t even dare question me. She just picked her ass up and came back.”

Hall still seems mystified by the project’s growth. As she works through the day, dashing for phone calls, patting swollen stomachs and caressing tear-stained cheeks, she seems more mother than executive.

Healthy babies are what she cares about. Each paper balloon on her wall has significance: a healthy new life. Although it is apparent to many outsiders that her project is a success, Hall says: “I can’t say that, even now. It’s such a fragile thing. And it changes every day. We are not talking here about ‘cases’ or ‘statistics.’ I don’t see this as one unified thing; I see it as sets of human relationships. If even one relationship breaks down, I feel we’ve failed.”

Dr. Barbara Aved of the Sierra Health Foundation, which gave the project a $345,000 grant, says she considers the investment sound. “The project is unique. It’s a volunteer grass-roots effort, one of the earliest to empower women to utilize resources and take care of themselves. “Results so far look very good,” she says. “For example, we would expect 20% of babies to be born toxicity-positive in the general population. But in Hall’s population, it looks like we’re near zero toxicity.”

Jerry Plummer, assistant director of children’s services for Sacramento County, calls Hall’s project “nothing less than super great. They have such a positive attitude toward women who are not usually valued in this society. When those women are valued, they begin to believe in themselves and to do better and achieve good things.”

Adds Charlene Meeks, associate secretary of the state Health and Welfare Agency: “There are a lot of healthy mothers and babies as a result of Hall’s program. . . . She literally took a back-yard project and turned it into something that made a difference in the world. She has structured it so the cost is minimal and the results are there.”

The Birthing Project thrived in Hall’s home from March, 1988, until June, 1989, while Hall continued working for the state. Word spread that the volunteers were making dramatic differences in their little sisters’ lives. Birth weights were up, the death rate fell to zero. About 300 babies have been born in the project, at an average birth weight of more than 8 pounds, Hall says.

Doctors, social service agencies and homeless shelters began to call with names of women. With the Sierra foundation’s July, 1989, grant, the project moved into a small office shared with a lobbyists’ group. By 1990, Hall was so involved with the Birthing Project that she quit her job. And in October, 1991, the project moved into its current 3,500-square-foot storefront, which will soon house a health clinic to be built and staffed with a $200,000 grant from the Irvine Foundation.

Besides Sacramento, the Birthing Project is thriving in Phoenix. One is slated to begin in Los Angeles next month and soon after in 34 states.

Long-term relationships are already burgeoning, says Hall, who receives a small salary from the project. One of her own little sisters from the very first baby bunch in 1988 calls her constantly. Only now the roles are reversed.

“She’s matured a lot, has a good life and her beautiful baby is already 4 years old,” Hall says. “Now she’s the one who worries about me. She knows I don’t eat right, and she’s concerned I’ll get sick.”

Hall says more than half of the sister-friends stay in contact with their little sisters for more than one year after the child is born.

Volunteers range from teens to grandmothers, from women on welfare to wealthy movers and shakers of Sacramento society. Each decides how much time she can spend and what kind of little sister she’d like to have.

Some don’t want to deal with drug mothers, for example. Others specifically ask for someone with major health or emotional problems.

“We have a match for anyone. In the four years we’ve been doing this, we find it’s often the hardest-working women with the littlest time to spare who accomplish the most.

“Some have worked desperately to become very successful and very middle class, only to find something was missing in their lives--a sense of community. They find it here. And any group can do the same. We’re about to train a group of Jewish women from B’nai B’rith who want to start a project of their own.”

Impingo Griffin Kondwani spends most days at the Birthing Project, often working at the computer she brought from home. “Mine does better graphics than the one they have here,” Kondwani says, “and that’s my field of expertise.”

Kondwani was a full-time graphics artist and a part-time actress and poet when she got her first little sister last year. “It was a wonderful, interesting, fulfilling experience,” Kondwani recalls. “I was married but had no children of my own. She was single, alone, pregnant with her first child and in the hospital for diabetes on the day we first met. It’s fascinating, because you’re asked to come together with somebody on this very intimate basis, though you’ve never seen each other before.

“We became very close and see each other still,” says Kondwani. “Her baby, Herman, is about 1 1/2 years old. And I’ve had two more little sisters since then.”

Azizza Davis, manager of the Birthing Project, had been an information systems specialist for 20 years when she left real estate investment a few months back to work with Hall full-time.

“First I became a sister-friend to a 16-year-old pregnant with her second child. She was the product of a life in foster homes and she’s still in one.

“At first the relationship was strained,” recalls Davis. “She wasn’t used to having somebody who cared about her. But I called her constantly, kept making contact. She already had MediCal and a doctor. What she didn’t have was love.”

Love seems to be the one thing all these young women need. But is it realistic to expect a sister-friend to provide the unconditional adoration a mother might give?

“It’s not unrealistic at all,” says Hall, herself a mother of three. “Love is at the basis of all this.” She says she and her eight siblings were raised in a loving home in the Imperial Court housing project in Los Angeles.

“I did not go into this because I love babies, but because I love healthy, caring adults,” Hall explains. “And the way to grow those adults is to love them and treat them well from the moment they’re conceived.”

The more Hall works on her project, the more she moves away from her old professional self:

“There is something strange about the way we train professionals in this country, especially those in the helping professions,” says Hall, who received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA. “We take an illness or an addiction and make it so technical that we separate it from the person.”

Hall says California has many services for pregnant women, but they are separated into different departments and rarely coordinate across agency lines. The women are often the losers.

This is why Hall has begun a Council of Caring in Sacramento, which brings together representatives from the 14 local departments concerned with pregnant women.

“It’s part of our railroad, to pass our women through these agencies, getting the help they need. If this had existed when I first met the mother whose baby died in my arms, the baby would never have died.”