12/31/2025
🍼🤰👶 When Michelle Lloyd moved to Baldwin County from New Zealand, she expected cultural differences. What she didn’t expect was how differently new mothers experienced life after bringing a baby home.
In New Zealand, Lloyd said, postnatal care is built into daily life, with nurses visiting families at home and new parents regularly connecting with others nearby. After settling on the Alabama gulf coast, she noticed a contrast — not a lack of care, but a lack of connection.
“I realized that there were a lot of people, a lot of mamas, that were struggling,” Lloyd said. “They didn’t have family close by.”
That observation became the foundation for Lloyd’s work as a postpartum doula and, more recently, for Bumps and Babies, a community space she co-founded with longtime nurse and lactation consultant Scotty Thomson. Together, they are part of a growing effort to meet the needs of Baldwin County’s expanding population — particularly young families navigating pregnancy, birth and early parenthood in a region changing as quickly as it is growing.
Baldwin County’s population has increased nearly 13% since 2020, rising to an estimated 261,608 residents in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Much of that growth has come from families relocating to the area, often without the extended family networks that once helped guide new parents through the early weeks after birth. As the county grows, Lloyd and Thomson said, the need for prenatal and postnatal support — education, follow-up care and community — has grown alongside it.
Read the full story at the link in the comments!
✍️: Gabriella Chavez, Report for America Corps Member / GCM Staff Reporter
📷: / Gulf Coast Media
