When award-winning scholar Dominique Earland ’17 crossed the stage at Commencement, she could track her academic accomplishments and the life path she has chosen directly back to the lessons about love, nurturing and vulnerability that she learned from her mother.
After Texas’ maternal mortality rate spike last year made international headlines, and the state’s family-planning resources continued to decline, Dominique focused her Community Outreach Fellowship, funded by SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program, to create a 36-page life-saving toolkit for women facing motherhood. “Your Right to Health,” completed with input from Dallas County’s Fetal-Infant Mortality Review program at Parkland Hospital, is filled with medical advice and community resources.
Also, her 2016 research on anemia in pregnancy in western Jamaica has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication – a remarkable achievement for an undergraduate student.
Dominique says her ongoing efforts to strengthen women’s health rights and education will forever be linked to “the unbreakable bond that exists between mother and child.”
Read more at SMU News.