The Portal
Ancestra Perinatal was created to accompany and uplift BIPOC pregnant and birthing people, their families, and their team.
We support women, gender-nonbinary people, families, and their providers with the resources, strategies, and accompaniment to create empowered, autonomous, and dignified experiences of pregnancy, labor, birth, postpartum, and infant feeding.
We assert that birthing people should feel self-determined, nurtured, and deeply respected throughout the perinatal period.
We understand the perinatal period as a powerful re-birth—not just of a child, but of the birthing person, their family, and their wider support system. We honor this major transition on your terms with individualized, nonjudgemental care involving members of your support system.
When you work with Ancestra Perinatal, we co-create an individualized accompaniment plan—a personalized blend of education, emotional and physical support, prenatal and postpartum visits, and virtual guidance—tailored to your stated needs and priorities.
Our Commitments
At Ancestra Perinatal, we move in alignment with the values and principles of:
Black Feminism, as articulated in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, meaning that, among many other commitments, we honor and center the lived experiences of Black women.
Reproductive Justice, following SisterSong’s framework: the right to have children, not have children, and raise the children we have in safe, sustainable communities.
Birth Justice, which affirms and defends the unconditional bodily autonomy of pregnant and birthing people.
Our values are also deeply informed by the frameworks of healing justice, transformative justice, and disability justice.
About the Founder
Sophia Evangeline Gumbs, CPD
Board-Certified Perinatal Doula based in Providence, Rhode Island
Sophia Evangeline Gumbs is a perinatal doula certified with Mama Glow Doula Homeschool and the RI Certification Board, a trained abortion doula, and a childbirth educator. She is based in Providence, Rhode Island and has been working with families since 2022. Sophia serves as a co-facilitator for the Doulas of Color Network, a dedicated peer-to-peer support and mentorship space for practicing, formerly-practicing, and aspiring BIPOC birth workers in Rhode Island which emerged from SISTA Fire’s Black Maternal Health Campaign.
Sophia is passionate about supporting women and families with emotional, physical, and educational resourcing through the perinatal period, uplifting birthing people’s ancestral and intuitive forms of knowledge, promoting peer mentorship and community among BIPOC birth workers and aspiring birth workers, and advocating for the protection of bodily autonomy, the authoritative embodied knowledge of birthing people, reproductive self-determination, and health and wellbeing as defined within diverse BIPOC communities.
Sophia centers Black women in her work and is dedicated to providing the most evidence-based, empathetic, and individualized care and education possible to the many different types of families and providers she works with.