ASHEVILLE – Thirteen years ago Nikita Smart gave birth to her daughter with the help of strangers. She and the girl’s father had split. Her family lived out of town. So the hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, had a sitter stay in the room during labor.

Friends stopped by to check on her, but Smart encouraged them to leave. They had jobs to get to and children to look after. "I was just totally alone,” said Smart, who was considered high-risk because of pre-eclampsia, a potentially dangerous pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure.

Smart, 44, is now training to be a doula and leading efforts in Pisgah View and Hillcrest apartments to make sure expecting African-American mothers in those publicly subsidized neighborhoods never feel like help is far away.

Read more here.

ASHEVILLE - Rani Khan "caught" her first baby when she was just 4 years old. Her mother, a natural health advocate, had planned a home birth and Khan's sister came sooner than expected. It was just Khan and a birth assistant there to help the laboring woman. The toddler had pushed a chair to the wall to reach the rotary phone and call for help, but the baby came before the midwife arrived.
​
Kahn's mother labored for only 15 minutes. The young girl was sitting on a futon when she witnessed her sister's first breath. It was an experience she never forgot. By age 39, Kahn, now a certified nurse midwife, has delivered some 3,000 babies, even though she has no children of her own.

Read more here. 

ASHEVILLE – The question isn't so much why their protests matter, when in reality the deaths of two unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers happened hundreds of miles away. The real question is what happens next locally to keep frustrations from boiling over into violence as they have in other parts of the country, community activists say. "The environment here is ripe for it," said James Lee, a minister at St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church. "It's almost like having an open flame in a room with gas. It's only a matter of time before something explodes."

Hundreds of people have joined in at least seven rallies across Buncombe County since a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and another grand jury in New York City failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, who was allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

In some cases, demonstrators held pictures of Reynolds High football player A.J. Marion, who was killed in 2013 by an Asheville police officer following a residential break-in, report of a gunshot and ensuing foot chase. Like Brown, Marion was unarmed and the officer was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

Black Americans have spent decades under siege, said Tyrone Greenlee, executive director of Christians for a United Community, a local nonprofit interdenominational collaboration of churches that works to address the root causes of racism and racial disparity through advocacy, education and training.

Read more here.

ASHEVILLE – Abortion-rights activists held vigil outside the governor's mansion in Raleigh amid statewide concern last year as North Carolina ordered an overhaul of safety regulations for abortion providers. Those protests have subsided, and what's left of demonstrators on the issue in Asheville includes three to four people who meet weekly to hold signs opposing abortion outside a planned new clinic.
​
It's not that passions on the issue have been set aside, but disagreement on proposed new regulations has calmed in North Carolina. In a rare movement of accord, the state's largest abortion providers and abortion-rights advocates sided with state officials earlier this week, tentatively agreeing on proposed rule changes for abortion providers.

The changes up for public review come in response to a 2013 legislative directive mandating that the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services create new requirements for abortion providers.  They include the right to annually inspect any licensed clinic and standards for building codes, record-keeping, nurse staffing qualifications, emergency procedures and post-operative care.
Rules for certification of abortion clinics have not been updated in nearly 20 years, DHHS noted in a Nov. 14 fiscal impact analysis of the proposed regulations.

Read more here.

ASHEVILLE – Young parents, Rebecca and Evan Gurney concede that having a child for the first time is terrifying. But for the North Asheville couple that fact doesn't mean childbirth isn't universally an intimate, even sacred, procedure, something enhanced by the holistic approach of birth centers. The decisions parents make about birth are indicators of how they want to start a family and their lives together, Rebecca Gurney said.

For their first child, the Gurneys went to North Carolina's only nonprofit birth center in Chapel Hill, where they delivered with the assistance of a certified nurse midwife. The relaxed environment and holistic approach empowered them to feel controlled and capable in the delivery room, they said. It's the kind of setting that an Asheville group wants to see in the planned WNC Birth Center, which could open in 2016, making it the state's second nonprofit center for childbirth supervised by licensed nurse midwives.

​Read more here. 

ASHEVILLE – As many people indulged Thursday, several of the area's less fortunate feasted on food that would have otherwise been wasted. Thanks to an elaborate network of food pantries, industrial farmers, mega distributors and local groceries all brought together by MANNA Food Bank, thousands of meals that would have unnecessarily ended up in landfills instead were served up on people's holiday tables. "It's really pretty amazing," said Cindy Threlkeld, executive director of MANNA Food Bank. "It's more complex than it looks on the surface."

In 2013, MANNA, which operates on the basic premise that the people of Western North Carolina should be able to live without the barrier of hunger, distributed 12.8 million pounds of food to pantries throughout the region. It's like giving out 1,100 meals every hour of every day, the nonprofit estimates. Much of the food ends up at MANNA by mistake, unwanted by consumers or considered unmarketable by industry giants. Yet, with increased need and limited resources, area charities argue these blunders are lifesavers, providing people with much needed sustenance and comfort.
Read more here. 

ASHEVILLE — Entering the Smith-Hendrix household can be a little insane, warned Leigh Smith as she opened the door to her modest West Asheville home, found on a quiet residential street.
With two children younger than 5, there are seldom moments of silence.

Before the door even closed, Joe, 3, squirmed off his mother's hip to eagerly show off the picture he had drawn of a scary monster. His older sister, Quinn, 4, put down the book she was reading and vied for attention.

The house may be a bit crazy, but it's filled with love, said Smith, 41, as she gently hushed the children's chatter and sat down next to her wife, Crystal Hendrix.

Read more here.