The health disparities that exist for Black mothers in America are well documented. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from childbirth than their White counterparts. Yet, aside from listing “being Black” as a risk factor for maternal death, little has been done to address this alarming statistic. The inaugural Black Maternal Health Week, held from April 11–17, 2018, sought to change this through offering a forum for continued conversation. Importantly, they shed light on an oft-overlooked but significant distinction: The huge disparities between Black and White maternal mortality are not due to race, but racism.
Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, founder of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, asserts, “Based on well-established data, risk factors are categorized as modifiable or non-modifiable, and health-care providers use them to counsel patients on how they can avoid or decrease their likelihood of death or disease. Knowing the risk factors allows patients to do things like get tested earlier for an illness or, for example, participate in a smoking cessation program. Risk factors can include attributes like fair skin for melanoma, which you can’t modify but you can cover or add sunscreen. But no one’s saying that whiteness is a risk factor for melanoma.”
A growing body of research indicates that, in fact, the stress caused by discrimination plays a noteworthy role in both maternal and infant mortality.
Amani Nuru-Jeter, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is researching how chronic stress from discrimination causes biological changes that lead to health disparities. She says, “Prolonged elevation and circulation of the stress hormones in our bodies can be very toxic and compromise our body’s ability to regulate key biological systems like our cardiovascular system, our inflammatory system, our neuroendocrine system. It just gets us really out of whack and leaves us susceptible to a bunch of poor health outcomes.”
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