Writing It Down Is a Political Act
How one woman's labor experience inspired her to build an app that gives Black women agency over their maternal health data.
I spent most of the night alone in pain, pressing a call button no one answered and listening to Maverick City Music until the contractions made even worship music impossible.
I gaslit myself through it.
However bad this is, just assume you're barely dilated.
By 8 a.m., I was at a seven.
When my midwife — Lindsey, CNM — finally came back, she looked at me and said:
"It seems like you really know your body."
Seven words.
That sentence is the reason I built [fenna].
Because I did know my body.
And I had almost not been given the space to prove it.
Before I became a mother, I knew the statistics intellectually. Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at more than three times the rate of white women. According to CDC data from 2024, the rate for Black women is 44.8 per 100,000 live births. For white women, it is 14.2. That gap has barely moved even as the overall U.S. maternal mortality rate has declined.
The disparity is not narrowing — it is widening.
I knew those numbers.
What I did not fully reckon with until I was pregnant was that they are not just statistics.
They are the sum of thousands of individual moments when a woman knew something was wrong, said so, and was not believed.
The healthcare system records what it measures.
It does not record what it dismisses.
A woman in labor, alone, pressing a call button — that night does not make it into her chart.
Neither does the moment she decides to stop asking because no one is coming.
Neither does the quiet arithmetic she does in her head:
If I make it to morning, everything will be fine.
That gap between what is recorded and what is experienced — that is where Black women die.
I am a Georgetown MSBA student. I have spent years learning how to make data legible to people who need to act on it.
And what I kept coming back to was this:
The most powerful thing a woman can do inside a system that was not built for her is document what the system refuses to record.
Not because documentation fixes the system.
It does not.
But because a timestamp is evidence.
A PDF you hand your provider at the next appointment is advocacy.
A record that exists outside their chart — in your hands, under your control — is something no one can dismiss with:
"You seemed fine when I checked on you."
That is what [fenna] is.
A maternal health companion app where women can log symptoms, track their experiences, and generate documentation they own.
Built to support women from the first symptoms of pregnancy through four months postpartum — because postpartum is where the mortality gap is often worst and where women are most frequently told they are overreacting.
The name comes from Dutch.
It means peace.
That is what I wanted every woman who came to the app to feel — not just the peace of being safe, but the peace of being believed.
The brackets in [fenna] come from something else:
The way we use brackets in writing to hold what is implied.
What does not need spelling out because you already know.
What is understood between people who have been through the same thing.
You belong inside these brackets.
I built [fenna] the same way I labored:
With faith.
With support.
And with the stubborn conviction that women who know their bodies deserve to be heard.
I am half Dutch, half Black.
I am a mother.
I am a military spouse finishing a master's degree in December.
I never imagined I would become a founder.
I used to want a clean W-2 and a door that closed at 5 p.m.
But this felt like the thing I could not not do.
The best advice I can give any woman building something that starts with her own experience is this:
The insight is in the gap.
Look at what the system records.
Look at what it does not.
That distance between the two — that is exactly where the work lives.
Write it down.
Trust it.
Take it with you.
Phoebe Lamb is the founder and CEO of Fenna Health LLC and the creator of [fenna], a maternal health companion app. She is a Georgetown MSBA candidate graduating in December 2026.
