About Us
Bellies Abroad is a registered Not for Profit whose mission is for every family to have a positive, safe and respected birth, to make well informed choices, and to receive the help and support they need during pregnancy, post natal and parenting experiences.
About
We give parents, and parents to be the confidence and information they need to have the birth and parenthood experiences they are looking for instead of what is easiest for hospital staff and most lucrative for medical professionals.
Unlike many other pregnancy, birth, health and wellness resources that base information on cultural assumptions, Bellies Abroad gives parents the resources needed to navigate this chapter of life wherever they may be, delivered through consultations with W.H.O. compliant professionals through online consultations, in home or in office visits. In addition to putting you in contact with carefully vetted and compassionate providers, we present fact based information in our Resources section on an array of relevant topics from health and well being to local norms. Last but not least, Bellies abroad also offers a welcoming community, both on and off line, to give you the support needed to make embarking upon your new transitions as smooth as possible.
Bellies Abroad was created because becoming a family can be daunting enough – doing it in another culture can be very overwhelming… We know, we have done it ourselves! Bellies Abroad is the fruition of ten years of experience working and living within this unique niche. Founder Kiersten Miller’s own birth adventure lead her to helping women learn from her experiences. Through her stores The Milk Bar she has been in a unique position to hear women speak openly and honestly about their birth and parenting experiences for the past 10 years. Hearing these stories has given her rare insights into what families need while embarking upon their parental journeys. Kiersten has been a trailblazer in bringing about change in her community as well as having already worked with the UK government to change their policy regarding maternal coverage for their foreign office families.
Bellies Abroad was created for you and your family, so please feel free to contact us with any questions, comments or feedback. Welcome to the greatest adventures of your lives!
Our Founding Mamas
Kiersten Pilar Miller
Kiersten is a born and raised New Yorker and a Rome resident as of 2004. At the age of 15 she lived in an Athabascan Indian village in Alaska where she ate moose meat ice cream and attended a potlatch. At 16 she lived in Arles, France for a semester where she learned what real coffee is. That summer she lived on the Carribean Island of Grenada where she worked in a batik factory and learned sign language to communicate with her deaf co-workers.
After graduating from Wesleyan university she started a career in film production where she walked up the on ramp of the 59th street bridge before dawn to stage a traffic jam, cued the shutting off of the lights at Yankee stadium, had Jack Nicholson call her “Sport” and spent a Christmas party adoringly listening to Christian Bale speak in depth about the incredible impact his stepmother had had on his life, only to later realize she had spent the better part of her evening hearing stories about the great Gloria Steinem.
In 2004 HBO brought her to Rome to work on their series “Rome”. At the end of season two she announced her pregnancy. At this point she spoke Italian, but no matter your mother tongue, pregnancy gives you a whole new vocabulary.
Living in Rome,, she soon realized how few resources there were for mothers. Despite all of the obstacles of Italian bureaucracy, she opened The Milk Bar in Rome in May 2009; it is a store, a meeting place and information point for pregnancy, breastfeeding and motherhood. Bellies Abroad is essentially The Milk Bar 2.0, whose aim is to arm women with the confidence and information to have the birth and motherhood experiences they are looking for instead of what is easiest for the medical professionals. When women become mothers, we are full of fears and doubts; we do not need the medical community exacerbating this for profit or indolence. Helping women go through this incredibly transformative process without the support of friends and family from home is a wonderfully fulfilling part of her job. She has seen women who have taken control of their birthing experiences by refusing to acquiesce to the bullying of the hospital staff, using the information she has given them and they have come through the experience empowered, knowing that their voices have made a difference in their own birth experience, and also hopefully for those who come after them. Even on slow days, one of her moms invariably comes in with a cake or a thank you note to remind her that although Italy can be infinitely frustrating, she is doing something worthwhile. It is also something that her daughter Millie can be proud of, as she said when she was five years old: “Mamma, I am proud of you, not because you are my mamma but because you help mammas learn how to birth, feed and take care of their babies, and that is really important.” No amount of cocktails with Christian Bale could ever top that.
Jenni Sili
Born and raised in Sweden Jennie early felt like she didn’t exactly fit into the Swedish way of living. As soon as she finished college she was in a hurry to travel the world and left to backpack around East Asia the year she turned 20. One country she really fell in love with was Indonesia, and when returning to Sweden she couldn’t stop thinking about going back. Determined to be able to spend a longer time in Indonesia she moved to Oslo, Norway where she heard it was easy for a committed Swede to put some money in the bank.
After she had been saving for some time the money was however not used for another Indo trip, instead she flew to Kenya where she travelled across the country together with her family and a group of university students. The trip really opened her eyes to the vast problems our world is facing and she decided she wanted to get an education that could help her in trying to make some difference.
One bachelor degree later, after writing her graduation paper on working street children in Tanzania, Jennie finally made her much longed move to Bali, Indonesia. Initially she was working with her main passion, horse riding, and at the same time volunteering for multiple organizations mainly dealing with women- and child rights issues. In 2012 she started to work as a Research and Social Development Officer within the Indonesian resource industry. 2015 she moved to Italy to study Human Rights and the following year she earned her Master degree from the European Inter-University University for Human Rights and Democratization in Venice.
In Indonesia Jennie met her husband; Italian/German Francesco born and raised in Rome. They met Kiki at The Milk Bar when expecting their first child in 2016. Through the birth course Jennie and Francesco were able to have the birth experience they felt was the best for them with the help of Bellies Abroad associated midwives. Even though the labor was not exactly a walk in the park, Jennie experienced giving birth as a wonderful, empowering event where she felt loved and respected the whole time. Pregnancy and birth amazed her and she now feels extremely devoted in helping other women being able to feel the same after giving birth. She believes this is a woman’s inherited right, and a right that is far too often overlooked.
Our Advisors
Gabriella Pacini
Gabriella is an obstetrician and board certified IBCLC lactation consultant, she has been the leading educator on birth, pregnancy and lactation for the Bellies Abroad project. She truly believes that every family has their own path to choose and does her utmost to make sure they are given the tools to find it. Gabriella grew up in Rome with a Czech mother and an Italian father. She has practiced in Italy and Tanzania as well as toured labor wards in China, Morocco and India. She speaks Italian, Czech, English and some German. She has two sons, one of whom is currently living in Berlin. When asked what she does for a living, she responds “I work in the oldest profession in the world.”
Muriel Moscardini
Muriel is a 20 years international professional in technology and ecommerce. She brings a wealth of experience in new business development, growth, strategy building and in driving operations in an international environment. Muriel is a keen mentor and senior advisor for international accelerators. Her background is mix between “large group and start up”, which makes her master the art of bringing out the best of both worlds. More than her business value, Muriel is personally related to Bellies Abroad. She is a French national who has been expatriated for the past 10 years in 2 different countries, where her 2 daughters were born. Muriel has a special link with and understanding of Bellies Abroad, as she fully represent our target. She is involved at a global level in mental health and in WHO activities. On top of all, she brings her smile and positive energy to the advisory board. · Partner, Mobile Digital Sports · Founder, Move Forward International · Founder, True Lively · Co-founder BCN teca casa · Supply Chain Manager in Gemalto, Operations manager in Altran, CEO in Spain and USA of Fluendo · Mentor, French Tech Barcelona · Mentor, Start up Next /Techstar · Advisory board member, Exipple · Advisory board member, LUISS EnLab Accelerator · International Advisory board, Global Mental Health, Columbia University
Oliver Page
Oliver was born and raised in Italy, by American parents. He founded his first startup at 17, NutKase Accessories, a B2B company that designs and manufactures accessory for tablets and PCs and sells products in the education and business sectors. Unilever one of its most important customers has also hired Oliver as a consultant for their European tablet rollout. After his first year at the University of Lancaster in Britain, he was accepted at the Draper University of Heroes, a school for entrepreneurs founded by Tim Draper. During the program he founded a new startup that won first place at Investor Day where he received an investment of $ 50,000 by Tim Draper himself. He went on to work in China, the UK, and California before moving back to Rome start his third startup Scooterino, which received an investment of € 50,000 from the European Space Agency in 2014, and is now closing another investment of € 500,000.
Giacomo Peldi Guilizzoni
Peldi is a born and raised Bologna boy, who moved to the US in 2001 where he lived and worked for 6 1/2 years before creating Balsamiq Mockups, a rapid wireframing software that combines the simplicity of paper sketching with the power of a digital tool so that teams can focus on what’s important. Peldi claims he doesn’t know what he’s doing most of the time, but is having a blast. He is actually one of the smartest and most giving people in the tech world. He is currently located in Bologna with his American wife and Italo-American son raising a new puppy and and continuing to create his own rules.
David Hart
David Hart is a creative problem solver with lots of energy and a soft spot for logistical nightmares. As Global Development Director of Ogilvy & Mather he spent many years based in London but travelling the world pioneering the development of international advertising. When the internet came along in the 1990’s he founded some of the first web design agencies and put companies like Levi’s, EMI, Unilever, Stella Artois, The National Gallery, easyJet, Tesco and many others online for the first time. He also launched Harry Potter & The Blair Witch Project. His last UK company was supposed to be a small in-house multimedia communications agency but it morphed into 150 people in 2 years and floated PartyGaming PLC on the London Stock Exchange in 2005 with a market capitalization of $8 billion. In 2006 he took his Dutch wife and two children travelling around the world for a year. They stopped off in Rome on the way home, had a third child. And stayed.
Christine Frankopan
Christina Frankopan is a corporate and financial strategist and a deep technology enthusiast. She believes in backing innovators who have the courage to go out on a limb, break and do. She’s also a passionate advocate of agricultural biodiversity and of promoting STEM skills for girls. When she’s not doing all that, she’s either singing to her kids, dressing up in vintage clothes or playing with her Rubiks Cube. Christina is of Swedish and Croatian extraction, was raised in London and has spent large chunks of her life in France, Italy with a sprinkling of Russia for good measure. She is the mother of 3 beautiful polyglots and lives by the mantra: “Happy mother, happy baby”. It takes a village.
Our Mission
Bellies Abroad understands the challenges of becoming a family away from your own.
Our goal is to provide you with the best support and information possible so that you can make the best decisions for your family and feel “at home”. We do this through our three pillared approach of offering contact with carefully selected providers, informational resources and a welcoming community. These are the ingredients we have found, and science has shown, produce happy and healthy families no matter where they are.
For those of you who will be giving birth, we believe that the only “right” kind of birth is a well informed and supported one. We are all different; as are our birth experiences! We are here to help you make the best decisions for your family and insure your choices are informed and respected. Birth practices and expectations are very culturally influenced. Our providers follow the World Health Organization guidelines which are as “a-cultural” as possible and put the wellbeing of mother and child above all else. These 16 guidelines are based on the principle that each woman has a fundamental right to receive proper prenatal care: that the woman has a central role in all aspects of this care, including participation in the planning, carrying out, and evaluation of the care: and that social, emotional and psychological factors are decisive in the understanding and implementation of proper prenatal care.
WHO states that medical professionals should carefully give information and answer questions so that the mother can make her own decisions regarding her care. The medical team is there to pass on information, not judgement, and guide the mother in making decisions based wholly on what is best for the mother and child without commercial or other external influences. They need to be aware of cultural differences, treat them with respect and give advice accordingly.
16 Recommendations from the World Health Organization
- The whole community should be informed about the various procedures in birth care, to enable each woman to choose the type of birth care she prefers.
- The training of professional midwives or birth attendants should be promoted. Care during normal pregnancy and birth and following birth should be the duty of this profession.
- Information about birth practices in hospitals (rates of cesarean sections, etc.) should be given to the public served by the hospitals.
- There is no justification in any specific geographic region to have more than 10-15% cesarean section births (the current US c-section rate is estimated to be about 23%).
- There is no evidence that a cesarean section is required after a previous transverse low segment cesarean section birth. Vaginal deliveries after a cesarean should normally be encouraged wherever emergency surgical capacity is available.
- There is no evidence that routine electronic fetal monitoring during labor has a positive effect on the outcome of pregnancy.
- There is no indication for pubic shaving or a pre-delivery enema.
- Pregnant women should not be put in a lithotomy (flat on the back) position during labor or delivery. They should be encouraged to walk during labor and each woman must freely decide which position to adopt during delivery.
- The systematic use of episiotomy (incision to enlarge the vaginal opening) is not justified.
- Birth should not be induced (started artificially) for convenience and the induction of labor should be reserved for specific medical indications. No geographic region should have rates of induced labor over 10%.
- During delivery, the routine administration of analgesic or anesthetic drugs, that are not specifically required to correct or prevent a complication in delivery, should be avoided.
- Artificial early rupture of the membranes, as a routine process, is not scientifically justified.
- The healthy newborn must remain with the mother whenever both their conditions permit it. No process of observation of the healthy newborn justifies a separation from the mother.
- The immediate beginning of breastfeeding should be promoted, even before the mother leaves the delivery room.
- Obstetric care services that have critical attitudes towards technology and that have adopted an attitude of respect for the emotional, psychological and social aspects of birth should be identified. Such services should be encouraged and the processes that have led them to their position must be studied so that they can be used as models to foster similar attitudes in other centers and to influence obstetrical views nationwide.
- Governments should consider developing regulations to permit the use of new birth technology only after adequate evaluation.
Compiled from Care in Normal Birth: report of a technical working group 1997 – WHO/FRH/MSM/96.24
