Professor penned parenthood guide for lesbian couples

Cheri Pies, a professor of public health who broke barriers with her landmark 1985 book, “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” a bible of the “gayby boom” of the 1980s and beyond, died July 4 at her home in Berkeley. She was 73.

The cause was cancer, said her wife, Melina Linder.

Later in life, Pies (her first name was pronounced “Sherry”) became a pioneering researcher and professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, investigating the effects of economic and racial inequality in matters like infant mortality and health over generations.

But she made her name decades before her turn toward academia with her groundbreaking book. That journey began in the 1970s, when Pies was working 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 that time, the concept of openly gay parents was still mostly unheard-of in the culture at large.

Just that year, New York became the first state to say it would not reject applications for adoption 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.

Pies was struck by the lack of support available to same-sex parents, as well as the lack of basic information about the unique challenges they face. She began running workshops in her home in Oakland, advertising them with flyers in women’s bookshops 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 around the country. In response, Pies compiled her teachings and experiences into a book. “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” published by the lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, provided practical advice on a wide range 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 floodgates for countless other books about LGBTQ+ parenthood. “She was absolutely a pioneer, and those of us who came later built on her work,” G. Dorsey Green, a psychologist and author of “The Lesbian Parenting Book” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), was quoted as saying in an obituary about 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 out lesbians. Cheri started that conversation.”

Pies, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Boston University in 1976, would eventually turn to academia, receiving another master’s degree, in maternal and child health, from Berkeley in 1985 and a doctorate in health education there in 1993.

She was serving as the 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 go on to become the dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health.

Lu spoke about a concept called life course theory, which centers on the idea that the social and economic conditions at each stage in life, starting with infancy, can have powerful, lasting effects over generations. “What surrounds us shapes us,” Pies explained 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, Pies would eventually collaborate with Lu and others to create the Best Babies Zone initiative, a groundbreaking program that would study — and, ideally, improve — health conditions in economically challenged neighborhoods around the country.

The high incidence of low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome in such communities was a focus of the program. “Babies are the canary in the mine,” Pies said in her University of Alabama speech. “If babies aren’t born healthy, you know that something isn’t right in the community.”

Cheramy Anne Pies was born Nov. 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.)

In addition to her wife, Pies is survived by her sisters, Lois Goldberg and Stacy Pies.