Cheri Pies, a professor of public well being who broke boundaries together with her landmark 1985 guide, “Contemplating Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” a bible of the “gayby growth” of the Eighties and past, died on July 4 at her dwelling in Berkeley, Calif. She was 73.
The trigger was most cancers, mentioned her spouse, Melina Linder.
Later in life, Dr. Pies (her first title was pronounced “Sherry”) turned a pioneering researcher and professor on the College of California, Berkeley College of Public Well being, investigating the consequences of financial and racial inequality in issues like toddler mortality and well being over generations.
However she made her title a long time earlier than her flip towards academia together with her groundbreaking guide. That journey started within the Nineteen Seventies, when Dr. Pies was working as a well being educator for Deliberate Parenthood, counseling straight ladies contemplating motherhood.
Her focus started to shift in 1978, after her feminine associate adopted a daughter. At the moment, the idea of brazenly homosexual mother and father was nonetheless largely unheard-of within the tradition at giant.
Simply that 12 months, New York turned the primary state to say it will not reject purposes for adoption solely on the premise of homosexuality. A 12 months later, a homosexual couple in California broke boundaries as the primary recognized to collectively undertake a toddler.
Dr. Pies was struck by the shortage of help obtainable to same-sex mother and father, in addition to the shortage of primary details about the distinctive challenges they face. She started operating workshops in her dwelling in Oakland, Calif., promoting them with fliers in ladies’s bookshops and different locations the place lesbians gathered.
By the early Eighties, phrase of her work had unfold past the Bay Space, and she or he was bombarded with letters and telephone calls from lesbians across the nation. In response, Dr. Pies compiled her teachings and experiences right into a guide. “Contemplating Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” printed by the lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, supplied sensible recommendation on a variety of subjects, together with using sperm donors, authorized points surrounding adoption, and methods to construct a help community.
The guide, which appeared 30 years earlier than same-sex marriage was legalized nationally, opened the floodgates for numerous different books about L.G.B.T.Q. parenthood.
“She was completely a pioneer, and people of us who got here later constructed on her work,” G. Dorsey Inexperienced, a psychologist and writer of “The Lesbian Parenting Guide” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), was quoted as saying in an obituary about Dr. Pies on Mombian, an internet site for lesbian mother and father. “I might advocate her guide to shoppers. That was when lesbian {couples} had been simply beginning to consider having kids as out lesbians. Cheri began that dialog.”
Dr. Pies, who earned a grasp’s diploma in social work from Boston College in 1976, would finally flip to academia, receiving one other grasp’s diploma, in maternal and youngster well being, from Berkeley in 1985 and a doctorate in well being schooling there in 1993.
She was serving because the director of household, maternal and youngster well being applications for Contra Costa County, which borders Berkeley and Oakland, when she heard a lecture in 2003 by Dr. Michael C. Lu, who would go on to change into the dean of the Berkeley College of Public Well being.
Dr. Lu spoke a couple of idea referred to as life course principle, which facilities on the concept the social and financial situations at every stage in life, beginning with infancy, can have highly effective, lasting results over generations. “What surrounds us shapes us,” Dr. Pies defined in a 2014 lecture on the College of Alabama at Birmingham. “Some individuals would say your ZIP code is extra vital than your genetic code.”
At Berkeley, Dr. Pies would finally collaborate with Dr. Lu and others to create the Greatest Infants Zone initiative, a groundbreaking program that may research — and, ideally, enhance — well being situations in economically challenged neighborhoods across the nation.
In 2012, she turned this system’s principal investigator, after Dr. Lu took a publish within the Obama administration. The initiative included dwelling well being visits and work with neighborhood leaders to create parent-child play teams, enhance park security and improve job-skills coaching. It started in Oakland, New Orleans and Cincinnati and had unfold to 6 different cities by 2017, the 12 months Dr. Pies retired from Berkeley. This system continues to be lively as we speak.
“There are individuals doing large-scale coverage work round structural racism, making an attempt to alter coverage and observe,” Dr. Pies mentioned in an interview printed on the Berkeley College of Public Well being web site in April. “Greatest Infants Zone is on the different finish of the spectrum, going small-scale to make change for individuals who can’t look forward to coverage change to occur.”
The excessive incidence of low beginning weight and sudden toddler dying syndrome in such communities was a spotlight of this system. “Infants are the canary within the mine,” Dr. Pies mentioned in her College of Alabama speech. “If infants aren’t born wholesome, you understand that one thing isn’t proper locally.”
Cheramy Anne Pies was born on Nov. 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, the second of three daughters of Morris Pies, a doctor, and Doris (Naboshek) Pies, a nurse. (She later modified her title to Cheri.)
Rising up in Encino, within the San Fernando Valley, the outgoing, ebullient Cheri was a fan of films, significantly musicals like “My Honest Woman,” and bought an early style of the medical occupation working as a receptionist in her father’s workplace.
After graduating from close by Birmingham Excessive College, she enrolled at Berkeley in 1967, the place she earned a bachelor’s diploma in social science in 1971.
Berkeley on the time was a cauldron of Vietnam Struggle-era political passions, after the Free Speech Motion protests that rocked the campus beginning in 1964. “Although I used to be not actively engaged in it, I used to be actually uncovered to the politics of it,” she later mentioned of the motion.
Along with her spouse, Dr. Pies is survived by her sisters, Lois Goldberg and Stacy Pies.
She would finally channel Berkeley’s Sixties spirit of activism as an writer and professor, working to enhance the lives of brazenly lesbian mother and father of the Eighties and past — whose numbers swelled so rapidly that by 1996, Newsweek journal would report that an estimated six million to 14 million kids in america had not less than one homosexual mother or father.
“Adoption companies report increasingly more inquiries from potential mother and father — particularly males — who establish themselves as homosexual,” the article learn, “and sperm banks say they’re within the midst of what some name a ‘gayby growth’ propelled by lesbians.”
Lots of that era would acknowledge their debt to Dr. Pies for the remainder of her life, Ms. Linder mentioned in a telephone interview: “Cheri and I may very well be anyplace on the earth — on a hike in New Zealand or simply strolling within the Berkeley Hills — and folks would see her and cease to thank her, saying how Ben or Alice or whoever wouldn’t be of their life had been it not for Cheri.”
