Watching Black Maternal Health: Steps Towards Equitable Health Care – Blog Tips and Events for Content Creators Around the World

According to the Centers for Disease Control, black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. Multiple factors contribute to this crisis, such as variation in the quality of health care, underlying chronic illnesses, structural racism and implicit biases. At a recent BlogHer Health event, Pampers and BlogHer partnered with a panel of experts, medical professionals and advocates to shed light on the black maternal health crisis, share valuable insights into how to be your best advocate and discuss ways we can work towards an equitable future.

Guest speakers included moderator and model lawyer Jesyka Harris, licensed midwife, internationally certified lactation consultant, childbirth educator, doula trainer Kimberly Durdin and fertility physician Dr. Cindy Duke. Since the start of the pandemic, the maternal mortality rate for black women has increased by 36%. Because it looks like the pandemic is here to stay, Jesyka asked Dr. Duke how black women can improve their own maternal health outcomes and learn to stand up for themselves.

“I started medical school in 2001,” says Dr. Duke. “One of the first lessons they taught us was how disparate black maternal mortality numbers were in the United States compared to their white counterparts. Here we are 21 years later still talking about it and watching it get worse. Dr. Duke goes on to say that education is the first step in implementing change. “It has been rooted for over 100 years in our [healthcare] system… we need to talk about it, we need to acknowledge it, and then we can start fixing it,” says Dr Duke.

The conversation then shifted to Kimberly who discussed the differences she’s seen since 2020 in the way expectant mothers plan their childbirth experiences. “What happened with the pandemic is that people started to think that the hospital was for very sick people and ‘I’m pregnant, but I’m not sick, so I want to try to stay. away from space,” Kimberly says. “It raised a lot of awareness for people who had never thought about this way of giving birth. [out of hospital] before.”

The panel then began discussing the Momnibus Bill, which includes 12 individual bills to address the black maternal health crisis. So far, only one bill has been passed, which Dr. Duke noted she found extremely frustrating. However, despite the setback Bill has received, it has done its job of shedding light on the crisis.

“It sparked conversations at the state level,” says Dr. Duke. “It sparked conversations at the corporate medical level, which for 50 years has denied the reality of black maternal health and women of color in general.” She adds: “A big part of what the Momnibus bill does is that it forces [medical] management to ask, “what is going on in the structure of what we have created and perpetuated that leads to these numbers.

Watch the rest of the Black Maternal Health: Steps Towards Equitable Healthcare panel below or the entire BlogHer Health here.

This article was created by BlogHer for Pampers.