Black, Pregnant and Loving It by Yvette Allen-Campbell

Black children grow up without a mother because the healthcare system failed her.

The byproduct of this inadequate and uneven healthcare for minorities is that the already poor are falling further behind as more and more mothers die and leave gaping holes in their families and communities. What comes after is the emotional, physical, mental, and financial strain that sets families back as they are already fight for their survival on a multitude of other fronts. In a completely avoidable chain of events, the black community continues to lose its mothers. The fact that this nation’s healthcare is hostile to black mothers, and that healthcare in general is distributed unevenly to black women, compounds preexisting poverty. One factor, and a large factor at that, of what keeps black communities down is the hostile conditions that childbirth presents to black mothers across the nation. The odds of black women “ surviving childbirth are comparable to those of women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan, where significant proportions of the population live in poverty.” We already know that the poverty that exists in the United States disproportionately affects melanted people. The country as a whole is failing black mothers in their search for prenatal and post-natal care. This is the trickle down effect of a higher, systemic racism that pervades the government, at a variety of levels, and how it allocates its funding to the wrong channels. In places like New York City black women are 12 times more likely to die than white. In a national study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition. The solution is that melenated women must receive equal opportunity to healthcare as white women. So, what is the problem here? I think the problem is black prenatal and post-natal care, or, more accurately, the lack of black prenatal and post-natal care. There is no data to suggest that black women are somehow more unfit to bear children than their white counterparts.

Is this due to any other factor besides the fact that black women have, statistically, less access to healthcare? I think not. If you are a black mother, you are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes. When it comes to birth, however, the numbers dramatically rise. For example, a black woman is 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman and 71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer.

There is a general medical health disparity between white and melanated women that is well documented. This is a staggering fact that displays one of the widest of all racial disparities in women's health. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers. According to the CDC, black mothers in the U.S. It’s Black Maternal Week, April 11th - 17th, 2023.

Black, Pregnant and Loving It by Yvette Allen-Campbell