Cheri Pies, Writer of “Contemplating Parenthood,” Dies at 73

Cheri Pies, a professor of public well being who broke boundaries together with her landmark 1985 e-book, “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, stated her spouse, Melina Linder.

Later in life, Dr. Pies (her first identify was pronounced “Sherry”) grew to become a pioneering researcher and professor on the College of California, Berkeley College of Public Well being, investigating the results of financial and racial inequality in issues like toddler mortality and well being over generations.

However she made her identify many years earlier than her flip towards academia together with her groundbreaking e-book. That journey started within the Nineteen Seventies, when Dr. Pies was working as a well being educator for Deliberate Parenthood, counseling straight girls contemplating motherhood.

Her focus started to shift in 1978, after her feminine companion adopted a daughter. At the moment, the idea of overtly homosexual dad and mom was nonetheless largely unheard-of within the tradition at massive.

Simply that 12 months, New York grew to become the primary state to say it will not reject functions for adoption solely on the idea of homosexuality. A 12 months later, a homosexual couple in California broke boundaries as the primary recognized to collectively undertake a baby.

Dr. Pies was struck by the shortage of assist out there to same-sex dad and mom, 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 girls’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 cellphone calls from lesbians across the nation. In response, Dr. Pies compiled her teachings and experiences right into a e-book. “Contemplating Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” printed by the lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, offered sensible recommendation on a variety of subjects, together with the usage of sperm donors, authorized points surrounding adoption, and methods to construct a assist community.

The e-book, 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 Ebook” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), was quoted as saying in an obituary about Dr. Pies on Mombian, a web site for lesbian dad and mom. “I’d advocate her e-book to shoppers. That was when lesbian {couples} have 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 little one 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 little one 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 few 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 essential 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 will examine — and, ideally, enhance — well being situations in economically challenged neighborhoods across the nation.

In 2012, she grew to become this system’s principal investigator, after Dr. Lu took a put up 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 right now.

“There are individuals doing large-scale coverage work round structural racism, attempting to alter coverage and observe,” Dr. Pies stated 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 ahead to coverage change to occur.”

The excessive incidence of low start weight and sudden toddler dying syndrome in such communities was a spotlight of this system. “Infants are the canary within the mine,” Dr. Pies stated in her College of Alabama speech. “If infants aren’t born wholesome, you already know that one thing isn’t proper in the neighborhood.”

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 identify to Cheri.)

Rising up in Encino, within the San Fernando Valley, the outgoing, ebullient Cheri was a fan of flicks, significantly musicals like “My Honest Woman,” and obtained 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 Battle-era political passions, after the Free Speech Motion protests that rocked the campus beginning in 1964. “Despite the fact that I used to be not actively engaged in it, I used to be actually uncovered to the politics of it,” she later stated 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 Nineteen Sixties spirit of activism as an writer and professor, working to enhance the lives of overtly lesbian dad and mom 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 the US had at the very least one homosexual mother or father.

“Adoption companies report increasingly inquiries from potential dad and mom — 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 stated in a cellphone interview: “Cheri and I may very well be wherever on the planet — on a hike in New Zealand or simply strolling within the Berkeley Hills — and other people would see her and cease to thank her, saying how Ben or Alice or whoever wouldn’t be of their life have been it not for Cheri.”