The birth of Danielle Stewart’s daughter thrust her into advocacy. She tells the story often.
“Imagine walking into a hospital to have your first child,” Stewart said. “And leaving on a stretcher alone, paralyzed from your waist down.”
Stewart says a failed epidural left her paralyzed from the waist down — a claim at the center of a lawsuit she later filed against the hospital, which ended in a settlement. She had to learn to navigate new parenthood and a disability at the same time.
As she spent the following years learning to walk again, Stewart said her saving grace was access to safe, affordable childcare for her daughter, who she named Marilyn.
Now Stewart is joining forces with some of the state’s leading advocacy groups to tell her story to a wider audience as campaigns advocating for both Black maternal health and access to childcare continue to gather momentum around the state.
In Missouri, Black women are more likely to suffer maternal morbidity as state and community leaders work to reverse adverse outcomes. And as the state’s childcare crisis continues, a growing number of families are seeking out state subsidies to access affordable daycare.
It’s all connected, Stewart said.
“How do you talk about maternal health without talking about childcare?” she said.
‘Listen to your patients’
Stewart was induced in October 2014. Her epidural was placed, but she continued to feel contraction pains. Encouraged by the medical team to press the bolus to inject an extra dose of pain medication through the catheter, she instead felt an “electrical jolt” through her back that sent her scurrying up the side of the bed in agony.
The anesthesiologist dismissed her concerns, she said, attributing her pain to back labor. Eventually, a new epidural was placed before her labor ended in an emergency cesarean section.
Seventy-two hours later, Stewart still couldn’t feel her legs. According to her hospital records, which she obtained through her lawsuit, a nurse documented that Stewart refused to get out of bed to feed her baby.
Stewart survived, but her experience reflects a broader pattern advocates point to in Missouri delivery rooms.
In Missouri, Black women are 2.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women according to the state’s 2025 pregnancy-associated mortality review published by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
In 2024, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the Hear Her campaign highlighting women’s experiences with pregnancy, delivery and postpartum complications with the goal of increasing awareness around complications and encouraging medical providers to address implicit biases and take all patient concerns seriously.
Stewart is part of a local storytelling campaign called 2BHeard that mirrors the federal effort. The initiative was launched by Generate Health, a St. Louis area nonprofit focused on addressing racial disparities in maternal and infant health.
Lora Gulley, chief operating officer at Generate Health, said Stewart’s experience “tells a story of the importance of listening to women, listening to pregnant people, when they feel or notice things that aren’t right.”
This spring, Stewart told her story to a group of mothers and healthcare providers gathered in St. Louis. Her resounding call to action: “Listen to your patients.”
When members of her birth medical team called to check on her in the weeks following her injury, she told them: “Once I tell you something’s wrong, listen. Do you understand the scariest thing to me is a doctor that doesn’t listen to their patient.”
Childcare as a turning point
A few days after Marilyn was born, Stewart signed over temporary custody of her daughter to her mother. Then she was wheeled to a rehabilitation center in St. Louis where she spent the next several weeks.
She wasn’t able to breastfeed her daughter. Her career as a parent educator at St. Louis Public Schools was put on hold. When Stewart returned home, she faced rigorous physical therapy.
“It was the main focus of my life. I was a spectator in the caring of my child, she said. “I had to sit on the sidelines because of my physical state and watch my mom and brother take care of my child, which was traumatic enough.”
Marilyn turned 1. Time went by, and the toddler still wasn’t walking.
“At that point I realized my child wasn’t walking because I wasn’t walking,” Stewart said.
Eventually Stewart regained enough control of her legs to drive. The first place she took herself was on a search for childcare, anxious to put Marilyn in an environment with children who were walking.
Because of her disability and income, Stewart qualified for state subsidies, including the federal Early Head Start program which allowed her to access high quality childcare for her daughter at no cost.
Marilyn became the first Head Start student enrolled at University City Children’s Center in St. Louis County.
“This allowed me to focus on me enough, to rehabilitate myself enough, to not just be a mom to my kid, but to also rejoin the workforce eventually.”
For the first time since Marilyn was born, Stewart became the primary caregiver for her daughter, a role her mother and brother had previously filled. While her child was at the daycare center, Stewart could focus on outpatient rehabilitation, as well as taking care of household needs, like grocery shopping while using a scooter, without a roaming toddler in tow.
“When I saw what having childcare and affordable childcare did for my trajectory, I was convinced that it was extremely important that people, especially vulnerable people, have access to affordable child care,” she said. “Because it didn’t just help my child. It helped me too.”
There was no waitlist a decade ago when she enrolled Marilyn in Head Start.
But today, Missouri families living below the poverty line could face a delay. In March, the state began placing families who apply for childcare subsidies on a waitlist and now grants funding on a priority basis rather than first-come, first-served, attributing the change to a 19% increase in program demand the year prior. Within three weeks, more than 550 families were on the waitlist.
Stewart said the state’s ongoing child care crisis has motivated much of her advocacy work. This spring, she joined Kids Win Missouri in advocating for more access to safe, affordable childcare, sharing her story with lawmakers.
“It’s not only a story about all the things wrong with the system, but her triumph over it all,” said Casey Hanson, deputy director of Kids Win Missouri. “… I hope those kinds of things are a reality check to our legislators, because we bring those statistics and things to them all the time, but it doesn’t take in the same way as when you actually hear the story and see this isn’t someone who did something wrong or someone who made choices themselves that landed them in that position. This is a bigger systems issue that led to experiences that (Stewart) had.”
The safety net that helped her rebuild
Five years to the day after her daughter was born, Stewart reached a settlement agreement with the hospital.
She used the money to move out of St. Louis, purchasing a home in Ladue so she could send her daughter to one of the best school districts in the area.
Her feet are still paralyzed, but she can walk on her own with the help of ankle and foot orthotics. Her back is often in pain, and she still uses a scooter on days when she has to be on her feet often.
Stewart, who now works as a parent-community engagement specialist at the YWCA in St. Louis, said she frequently works with families who could benefit greatly from enrolling their children in childcare in order to invest time into their own work, education and personal betterment opportunities.
“Something just as simple as childcare allowed me to be able to focus on changing our trajectory,” Stewart said. “I wanted to take the situation and turn it into the best thing that it could possibly be for not only my daughter, but for me too, and I needed community to do that. And I didn’t do it alone. I needed social safety nets to do that.”
Stewart relied on a range of government and community programs to care for herself and her daughter as she underwent rehabilitation, including the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, also known as WIC, utility assistance and Medicaid.
Now some of those programs face cuts.
Earlier this month, the U.S. House approved a bill that would cut $141 million in fruit and vegetable benefits for WIC. Experts have estimated that if the appropriations bill ultimately passes, it would reduce monthly vegetable and fruit allowances by about 10%, according to The Washington Post.
“I don’t know of anybody who’s proud of having used food stamps or proud of having to use WIC; however, it fed my daughter,” Stewart said. “I think that it’s better to understand that we all share the same world but we don’t all share the same realities and there are things that we can make more equitable for people so that their outcomes can be better.”