Belinda Lashea – Nursing

Belinda Lashea - Nursing

Dr. Belinda Lashea is from North Carolina's mountains, and at 18 she became a mother. The baby was born in a hospital in Wilmington, but mother and child soon returned to the mountains. Two more children came; both were welcomed into the world at home with the help of midwives.

"That started my journey," Lashea said.

She first trained to become a midwife in the traditional ways. She was an apprentice. She learned to apply her mountain inheritance for the mothers she cared for. She was an upstart punk hippie who caught babies.

"We were underground, which in the mountains was a lot more accepted - especially in the '90s. The further east you go, the less cool it was and is," Lashea said.

She moved to Chapel Hill in 2007 with a plan to marry her high school sweetheart, but as sometimes happens, didn't . Her house in the mountains sold and her home birth practice shuttered, she was stuck in a place she didn't know with little direction forward.

"I had a GED, three kids and was alone in a town where I knew no one. My only real skill sets were training horses and catching babies," Lashea said.

At that point she was living with the little ones in a trailer with holes in the floor she had to staple rugs over. She felt betrayed by the midwifery tradition - she had real experience, but without a formal education, she had nowhere to go as non-nurse midwives had been banned by North Carolina in 1982.

She and her grandmother set a goal: she would get a doctorate so she could bring babies into the world again. How that would happen she wasn't quite sure.

Lashea worked all day on a farm, raised her three children and took classes full time at Durham Tech. Her stunted formal education meant she had to take remedial math classes to get into a two-year nursing program, but she stuck with it.

Along the way, one of her instructors suggested she check out the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program, which helps community college students get accepted into, and graduate from, UNC-Chapel Hill.

"I was like, 'Yeah, I don't think you understand. I've worked at Waffle House; I live in a trailer. I'm not going to Carolina anytime soon,'" Lashea recalled.

"When I got in, I thought, 'As soon as they see me, they're going to know they've made a mistake.' I mean, I had to buy my first bra and needed to quit smoking because that's probably what Carolina girls do," Lashea said. "But they supported me. Every door has opened."

She graduated on a full-ride scholarship and then worked for several years at UNC Hospital in Chapel Hill with new mothers and their babies. But at heart she was a midwife and her education level didn't allow her to make decisions she knew were right for those mothers and babies. She needed more schooling.

In 2016, Lashea graduated from East Carolina University's midwifery program. She was quickly recruited by a birth center in Chapel Hill, after five years, she became the director of midwifery there.

ECU's midwifery program director, Dr. Becky Bagley, saw something special in Lashea. She asked her to take on an instructor role, and to teach students about their profession that she learned as an apprentice in the mountains.

"When you grow up in the mountains as a midwife, you work with a lot of herbs, especially when you're underground. She asked me if I would do an herb workshop, which kind of became a thing," Lashea said.

Since that first workshop, she's shared that traditional knowledge with peers from the University of New Mexicoto Stony Brook Universityin New York.

Because she could finally have her own - legal - midwifery practice, she moved to Wilmington and opened her own private homebirth practice. She had clients before she even moved to the beach.

But there was still that plan that was birthed in that Orange County trailer - the promise to her Grandma to get a doctorate.

In 2021, she entered ECU's College of Nursing doctoral program. Her research focused on how to help midwives to be more reflective and prevent burnout in a profession that has become "medicalized and stacked against you."

ECU, Lashea said, has welcomed her in ways she didn't feel were possible, and encouraged her to spread her wings.

"I couldn't believe they let me into the midwifery program and then I couldn't believe it when Becky asked me to teach a course. And I really couldn't believe it when I got into the Ph.D. program," Lashea said."I've always been the outlaw. I've always expected rejection, and it's never come."

Lashea - the tattooed single mom who felt like she was never quite the ECU material - said the university has given her a home.

Now the Pirate nurse-midwife said she will blend her traditional knowledge with a world-class education to further the nursing profession, to benefit North Carolina mothers and babies from the mountains to the sea.

More Stories