Cheri Pies, who mentored lesbians in parenting, dies at age 73
Cheri Pies, a public health professor who broke barriers with her seminal 1985 book, “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” a bible about the “gayby boom” of the 1980s and beyond, died July 4 at her home in Berkeley, California. She was 73.
The cause was cancer, said her wife, Melina Linder.
Later in life, Dr. Pies (her first name was pronounced “Sherry”) a pioneering researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, where she examined the effects of economic and racial inequality in issues such as infant mortality and health across generations.
But she made a name for herself with her groundbreaking book decades before entering academia. That journey began in the 1970s, when Dr. Pies worked as a health educator for Planned Parenthood, counseling straight women considering motherhood.
Her focus began to shift in 1978, after her female partner adopted a daughter. At the time, the concept of openly gay parents was still largely unheard of in the culture as a whole.
That very year, New York became the first state to say not to deny adoption requests solely on the basis of homosexuality. A year later, a gay couple in California broke barriers as the first known to jointly adopt a child.
Dr. Pies was struck by the lack of support for same-sex parents, as well as the lack of basic information about the unique challenges they face. She began conducting workshops at her home in Oakland, California, and advertised them with flyers in women’s bookstores and other places where lesbians gathered.
By the early 1980s, word 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 her teachings and experiences in a book. “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” published by the lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, provided practical advice on a wide variety of topics, including the use of sperm donors, legal issues surrounding adoption, and ways to build a support network.
The book, which appeared 30 years before same-sex marriage was legalized nationally, opened the locks for countless other books on LGBTQ parenting.
“She was definitely a pioneer, and those of us who came later built on her work,” said G. Dorsey Green, a psychologist and author of “The Lesbian Parenting Book” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), in an obituary about Dr. Pies on Mombian, a website for lesbian parents. “I would recommend her book to clients. That was when lesbian couples were just starting to think about having children as lesbians. Cheri started that conversation.”
Dr. Pies, who received a master’s degree in social work from Boston University in 1976, would eventually turn to academia, earning another master’s degree in maternal and child health from Berkeley in 1985 and a doctorate in health education there in 1993.
She was director of the family, mother and child health programs for Contra Costa County, which borders Berkeley and Oakland, when she heard a lecture by Dr. Michael C. Lu, who would later become dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health.
Dr. Lu spoke about a concept called life course theory, which focuses on the idea that social and economic conditions at every stage of life, beginning with childhood, can have powerful, lasting effects across generations. “What surrounds us, shapes us”, explained Dr. Pies in 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 eventually team up with Dr. Lu and others to create the Best Babies Zone initiative, a pioneering program that would study—and ideally improve—health conditions in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods across the country.
She became the program’s principal investigator in 2012 after Dr. Lu had assumed a post in the Obama administration. The initiative included home health visits and working with community leaders to establish play groups for parents and children, improve park safety and improve vocational skills training. It started in Oakland, New Orleans and Cincinnati and ended in 2017, the year Dr. Pies retired from Berkeley, spread to six other cities. The program is still active today.
“There are people who do large-scale policy work structural racism, in an effort to change policy and practice,” said Dr. Pies in an interview published on the Berkeley School of Public Health website in April. “Best Babies Zone is at the other end of the spectrum, going small-scale to bring change for people who can’t wait for policy change.”
The high incidence of low birth weight and SIDS in such communities was the focus of the program. “Babies are the canary in the mine,” said Dr. Pies in her speech at the University of Alabama. “When babies aren’t born healthy, you know something isn’t right in the community.”
Cheramy Anne Pies was born on November 26, 1949 in Los Angeles, the second of three daughters of Morris Pies, a physician, and Doris (Naboshek) Pies, a nurse. (She later changed her name to Cheri.)
Growing up in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, the outgoing, outgoing Cheri was a fan of movies, especially musicals like “My Fair Lady,” and got a taste for the medical profession early on when she worked as a receptionist in her father’s office.
After graduating from nearby Birmingham High School, she enrolled at Berkeley in 1967, earning a bachelor’s degree in social sciences in 1971.
At the time, Berkeley was a cauldron of Vietnam War political passions, following the Free Speech Movement protests that shook the campus from 1964 onwards. “While I wasn’t actively involved, I was certainly exposed to the politics of it,” she later said of the movement.
In addition to her wife, Dr. Pies is survived by her sisters, Lois Goldberg and Stacy Pies.
She would eventually channel Berkeley’s spirit of 1960s activism as an author and professor, working to improve the lives of openly lesbian parents of the 1980s and beyond—whose numbers grew so rapidly that in 1996 Newsweek magazine would report that an estimated six million to 14 million children in the United States had at least one homosexual parent.
“Adoption agencies are reporting increasing inquiries from expectant parents — especially men — who self-identify as gay,” the article read, “and sperm banks say they are in the middle of what some are calling a ‘gayby boom,’ propelled by lesbians.”
Many of that generation would blame Dr. Recognizing Pies for the rest of her life, Ms Linder said in a telephone interview: “Cheri and I could be anywhere in the world – on a hike in New Zealand or just walking in the Berkeley Hills – and people would see her and stop to thank her, saying how Ben or Alice or anyone else wouldn’t be in their lives if Cheri wasn’t there.”