"From Their Very First Breath: Breaking Cycles of Incarceration in Families Begins at Birth "

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Amy Ard is the founding Executive Director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a nonprofit organization that breaks cycles of incarceration in families and ensures a healthy start for infants born to women in Georgia's prison and jails.  She has 25 years of experience leading nonprofits in the roles of community organizer, program director, and policy director.  In 2014, she founded DC Birth Doulas, the largest childbirth support agency in Washington DC.

While supporting clients as a doula in a busy Washington DC hospital in 2016, Amy witnessed a woman brought from a local jail to deliver a baby handcuffed to a medical gurney. That experience led her to research incarceration and pregnancy and eventually led her back to her home state of Georgia.  Motherhood Beyond Bars was incorporated in 2018 and successfully advocated for legislation, signed into law in 2019, that outlaws shackling of pregnant women in carceral facilities.

Motherhood Beyond Bars has delivered prenatal education to over 500 women in Georgia prisons and jails and has significantly expanded the program both in the number of women served and the programs offered to women and their families.  Motherhood Beyond Bars has enrolled nearly every infant born in the Georgia prison system into their Holistic Family Support Program, currently supporting over 220 infants statewide. The organization is engaged in research with the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University to better understand the impact of incarceration infants—a first of its kind study in the United States.

Amy is a graduate of Denison University in Granville, Ohio and Vanderbilt Divinity School and is a certified childbirth doula.  She's married to Michael Waller (Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice) and has three children.