It's Black Mother's Health Week and Mother's Day is just around the corner. This is a perfect time to highlight the fact that the critical medical care that pregnant women need remains inaccessible to many.
That's especially true for Black mothers and their unborn children.
The harmful and deadly effects of systemic racism in the access and delivery of necessary health services for Black people is generally neither a new nor unusual phenomenon.
Black people have received, and continue to receive, substandard medical care, even when the treatment they need is available.
Negative experiences can range from lack of access to preventive and basic primary care for early detection and management of potentially debilitating diseases and health conditions, to poor performance during doctor's visits and typical tests. These range from not receiving necessary and important information from health care providers. , or an office visit.
The data on this widespread practice is both alarming and conclusive.
The situation is even more dire for black pregnant women, who are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.
When expectant mothers do not have access to or receive poor quality health care services, the potential risks are often very dire for both mother and child.
Complications and death for Black mothers and their babies are all too common in the world's best health care system. The United States is the only developed country where maternal mortality rates are increasing.
why?
As if systemic racism wasn't enough to undermine proper care for pregnant Black women, politics must play an active and negative role.
The Biden administration has declared April 11-17 as Black Maternal and Child Health Week in 2024. The aim was to convey the urgency of continuing efforts to reduce maternal mortality and provide better health care.
This declaration paints a vivid picture of what often happens when Black pregnant women encounter complications and seek help. This means they are ignored or ignored by the health care providers who are supposed to care for them.
This week brought together many organizations, small businesses, grassroots groups, and funding agencies to raise public awareness and momentum about the need to address Black maternal and child health.
But regular attention in the form of designated weeks or months, special appropriations here and there, or limited funding, sadly results in regular and partial salvos. It's not a long term solution.
How can we create meaningful and lasting change to ensure Black pregnant women can access and receive the critical prenatal and postnatal care they need?
There is a group of legislators from several Midwestern states, including Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, working to pass substantive policy and spending. In both Missouri and Kansas, black women have significantly higher pregnancy-related death rates than white women.
The Black Mothers' Mannibus Act (Monnibus Act), a set of 13 measures to comprehensively address this issue, aims to improve outcomes by focusing on various aspects of pregnant women's quality of life. We are aiming for
We address everyday issues such as proper nutrition, transportation, accompanying medical issues such as substance use disorders, mental health, and other health challenges.
First introduced in 2020, the House of Representatives supporting the Monnibus Act is currently made up entirely of Democrats.
How can promoting healthy pregnancies and reducing the risk of health complications that can lead to death of mother and fetus become a partisan issue?
One would think that anti-abortion and anti-abortion people would be leading the fight for access to and access to quality maternal health care.
How can we be so pro-life and scream for protection for the unborn if we have no intention of making sure that both mother and baby are safe and healthy through pregnancy?
Even if you don't take the lead, you can definitely support the effort.
But the data shows a completely different story. States with the strictest abortion bans have the worst outcomes for maternal and child health.
Where is the disconnect?
More importantly, what is the cause?
It's an issue worth serious consideration because it continues to permeate and influence every other aspect of American life.
Unfortunately, the provision of medical services is no exception.
Not even for black unborn children and the mothers who choose and strive to give them life.
The organizations, communities, parent groups, and funders who have been working on the ground for decades to reduce mortality rates for Black pregnant women and babies should be recognized and celebrated.
But they alone cannot solve this pervasive and growing health problem that some have characterized as reaching crisis levels.
As with many other issues, when a person of notoriety or celebrity suffers or dies, our attention is drawn to it. But the shock and awe only lasts until another headline of a different nature replaces it.
How can we be so pro-life and scream for protection for the unborn if we have no intention of making sure that both mother and baby are safe and healthy through pregnancy?
Is this disconnect, this blind spot and hypocrisy, the result of the age-old scourge and nemesis of systemic racism? Is it because of deeply irrational partisan politics?
Or do they come together to form a destructive and deadly cocktail whose paralyzing effects continue to hold in their hands many negative aspects of black life in America?
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