Madeline Harris LeBlanc.

Hi. I’m Madeline. Most people call me Maddy, and this is the long way around to how I ended up walking into labor rooms in Louisiana.

I grew up the youngest of three girls in a household of strong women, raised in part by the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who are also very strong women. They modeled a life of service and unflinching advocacy, and I absorbed it. By high school I had a plan: I would be a midwife nun. I started at Belmont Abbey College intending to become a Catholic sister and a midwife, and God, in his good humor, had other plans. I walked into rooms with laboring families anyway, just by a different door.

I earned my BSN at Southeastern Louisiana University and went straight to the bedside, where I’ve been ever since, in both labor and delivery and the NICU. I witnessed injustice firsthand. The fire in my heart got stoked, and the need only grew: to do more, change more, and make this world better. The letters kept stacking up: RNC-OB and IBCLC for the bedside work, an MHA from LSU Shreveport for the systems work, ICEA-approved trainer status for the teaching, and now a doctorate underway at Oklahoma State. The thread connecting all of it is a deep belief that change happens through education and empowerment. Education is the one thing that can’t be taken away from you. Knowledge is power. That’s why I’m a forever learner.

I’m a wife, a mother of three, and Louisianan to the bone, which means I work in a state where birth inequity is rampant. Our maternal mortality numbers aren’t a mystery; they’re a result. They reflect what happens when systems are not designed for the people they’re meant to serve. That reality is the thing I’ve organized my life around changing.

Outside the labor room, that work has taken a lot of shapes. I’ve taught at William Carey University and Baton Rouge Community College, and held roles as Healthcare Programs Manager and Director of Healthcare Initiatives and Partnerships. The through-line across all of it is the same: curriculum development, pilot program implementation, workforce development, and serious community outreach. I have always had a passion to serve. I’ve also come to recognize that plenty of other people share that passion. My job, the way I see it, is to give them the tools to turn that passion into action.

That conviction is what led to Mary’s Hands Network. I believe anyone with the heart for this work should have access to the training, and in March 2023 I founded MHN to make that real. It grew out of the community’s desire on two sides at once: people wanted to become doulas and serve, and people wanted to have a doula and be served. Three years in, our capacity is limited by a growing influx of clients, and we’re working to meet the need with a curriculum that actually works, a volunteer network with statistically significant impact on key indicators of maternal and newborn health.

Building the network meant noticing what the doulas and families I was training didn’t have. The dense medical textbook didn’t exist for them. The fear-based pregnancy book wasn’t going to help. So I started writing what was missing: a textbook that actually trains a doula, a companion workbook to make it stick, a pregnancy guide that reads like a friend, a bereavement curriculum and its workbook no one else had written, and a pocket reference for the labor bag. Six ISBNs, all in service of the same mission.

Birth is sacred. Families deserve better. The way you change outcomes is to put real, rigorous, joyful preparation in the hands of the people who do the work.

That’s the work. The rest is who you get when you book me: a registered nurse, a lactation consultant, a doula trainer, an author, a birth justice advocate, and a Louisiana woman raised by nuns who still believes joy is a discipline. I love to laugh, I love to cry, I have no filter. If that’s the kind of voice you want in your books, your training room, or your speaker lineup, we’ll get along.