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Cheri Pies, a public health professor who broke barriers with her seminal 1985 book, “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” a bible of the “gay boom” of the 1980s and beyond, died July 4 at her home in Berkeley, California. She was 73 years old.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Melina Linder.
Later in life, Dr. Pies (her first name was pronounced “Sherry”) became a pioneering researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, investigating the effects of economic and racial inequality in areas like infant mortality and health across generations.
But she made a name for herself decades before turning to academia with her groundbreaking book. This journey began in the 1970s, when Dr. Pies worked as a health educator for Planned Parenthood, counseling heterosexual women considering motherhood.
His focus began to shift in 1978, after his female partner adopted a daughter. At that time, the concept of openly gay parents was still mostly unknown in the mainstream culture.
That year, New York became the first state to say it wouldn’t reject adoption applications solely on the basis of homosexuality. A year later, a California gay couple broke barriers as the first known to jointly adopt a child.
Dr. Pies was struck by the lack of support available to same-sex parents, as well as the lack of background information on the unique challenges they face. She began holding workshops at her home in Oakland, California, advertising them with fliers at women’s bookstores and other places where lesbians congregated.
By the early 1980s, news of her work had spread beyond the Bay Area, and she was bombarded with letters and phone calls from lesbians across the country. In response, Dr. Pies compiled his teachings and experiences into a book. “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” published by lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, provided practical advice on a wide range of topics, including the use of sperm donors, legal issues around adoption, and ways to build a support network.
The book, released 30 years before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, opened the valves for countless other books on LGBTQ parenting.
“She was absolutely a pioneer, and those of us who came later built on his work,” said G. Dorsey Green, psychologist and author of “The Lesbian Parenting Book” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), in an obituary for Dr. Pies on Mombian, a website for lesbian parents. “I would recommend his book to clients. This was when lesbian couples were just beginning to think about having children as lesbians. Cheri started this conversation.
Dr. Pies, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Boston University in 1976, eventually turned to academia, earning another master’s degree in maternal and child health from Berkeley in 1985 and a doctorate in health education in 1993.
She was director of family, maternal and child health programs for Contra Costa County, which borders Berkeley and Oakland, when she heard a lecture in 2003 by Dr. Michael C. Lu, who would become the dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health.
Dr. Lu spoke about a concept called life course theory, which is based on the idea that social and economic conditions at every stage of life, beginning with early childhood, can have powerful and lasting effects on generations. “What surrounds us shapes usexplained Dr. Pies during a 2014 lecture at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Some people would say your zip code is more important than your genetic code.”
At Berkeley, Dr. Pies would eventually collaborate with Dr. Lu and others to create the Best Babies Zone initiative, a groundbreaking program that would study — and, ideally, improve — health conditions in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods across the country.
In 2012, she became the program’s principal investigator, after Dr. Lu took up a post in the Obama administration. The initiative included home health visits and working with community leaders to create parent-child playgroups, improve park safety and improve job training. It started in Oakland, New Orleans and Cincinnati and expanded to six more cities in 2017, the year Dr. Pies retired from Berkeley. The program is still active today.
“There are people doing large-scale political work around structural racism, trying to change policy and practice,” Dr. Pies said in an interview posted on the Berkeley School of Public Health website in April. “Best Babies Zone is on the other end of the spectrum, going small to bring change to people who can’t wait for policy change to happen.”
The high incidence of low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome in these communities was the focus of the program. “Babies are the canary in the mine,” Dr. Pies said in his speech at the University of Alabama. “If babies are not born healthy, you know something is wrong with the community.”
Cheramy Anne Pies was born on November 26, 1949 in Los Angeles, the second of three daughters of Morris Pies, a doctor, and Doris (Naboshek) Pies, a nurse. (She later changed her name to Cheri.)
Growing up in Encino, San Fernando Valley, the outgoing and exuberant Cheri was a fan of movies, especially musicals like “My Fair Lady,” and got a taste of the medical profession working as a receptionist in her father’s office.
After graduating from nearby Birmingham High School, she enrolled at Berkeley in 1967, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in social science in 1971.
Berkeley was then a cauldron of political passions during the Vietnam War era, following the Free Speech Movement protests that rocked the campus beginning in 1964. “Even though I wasn’t actively engaged in it, I was certainly exposed to politics,” she later said of the movement.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Pies is survived by his sisters, Lois Goldberg and Stacy Pies.
She would eventually channel Berkeley’s 1960s spirit of activism as an author and teacher, working to improve the lives of openly lesbian parents of the 1980s and beyond—whose numbers swelled so rapidly that in 1996 Newsweek magazine would report that an estimate six million to 14 million children in the United States had at least one homosexual parent.
“Adoption agencies are reporting increasing numbers of inquiries from potential parents — particularly men — who identify as gay,” the article reads, “and sperm banks say they are in the midst of what some call a lesbian-powered ‘gay boom’.”
Many of this generation would acknowledge their debt to Dr Pies for the rest of her life, Ms Linder said in a telephone interview: “Cheri and I could be anywhere in the world – hiking in New Zealand or just walking in the Berkeley Hills – and people would see her and stop to thank her, saying Ben or Alice or whoever it was wouldn’t be in their lives without Cheri.
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