Meet the Black birth workers fighting the maternal and infant mortality crisis
Mortality rates are cut in half when Black babies in the U.S. are cared for by Black healthcare workers.
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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Sonya Lustig, a graduate of The New School’s Journalism + Design program, and Matriarchy Report's former intern. She lives in the Bay Area where she is now studying to become a registered nurse.
This piece mentions infant mortality and death during childbirth, which may be challenging to some readers. Please take care.
The health care inequities faced by Black pregnant women are no secret. The fact that Black mothers are four times more likely to die during childbirth, while their children are subjected to increased risks of low-birth weight and an infant mortality rate almost three times higher than their white counterparts is not new information.
What we don’t hear as much are the success stories—these focus not on what can go wrong when a white doctor treats a Black pregnant woman, but what can go right when these women are given the opportunity to receive care from birth workers of their own racial and cultural background. New research shows that mortality rates were cut in half when Black babies were cared for after birth by Black healthcare workers.
And there has been little media attention to those doing the majority of the work to bring racial justice to the delivery room: Black birth workers.
BElovedBIRTH Black Centering is one in a growing number of groups that are providing Black birthing people with care “by, for, and with” healthcare practitioners of the same race, a practice referred to as “racial concordance of care.”
I spoke with Jyesha Wren, the Certified Nurse Midwife who helped found BElovedBIRTH at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California.
“It’s really an empowerment-based model where people get to take more ownership and learn more about their own health,” Wren told me, when I asked how her group’s version of prenatal care to Black women differed from traditional, eurocentric models.
This empowerment is cultivated in various ways, from encouraging group discussions about what it means to be Black, to teaching participants how to monitor their own vital signs, and offering “wraparound social support” that helps provide food and housing security.
Danielle Mason, a participant of BElovedBIRTH Black Centering, echoed these sentiments of ownership and autonomy. Mason had experience with other prenatal groups in the past, but said that she found it challenging to open up about her experience as a Black woman navigating a medical system that was not built with her wellbeing in mind.
“The history of how we’ve been treated, and the way that we continue to be treated, it just really inhibits birth. It really makes it hard to speak up when you’re having pain and makes it very difficult to feel like you’ll be trusted or respected in these environments,” said Mason.
In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Mason said that BElovedBIRTH Black Centering had “completely restored [her] faith in what medical practitioners can offer.”
Mason isn’t alone in experiencing the benefit of Black-centered care during her pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience. When treated with racial concordance of care, Black birthing people report fewer instances of discrimination, and their babies experience significantly lower rates of low-birth weight and infant mortality, according to a 2020 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“When we have this racial and cultural concordance, the overall quality of care improves, the communication improves, the level of trust and understanding improves,” Wren said. “All those things are so important in a patient not experiencing discriminatory, racist care.”
The evidence shows that Black families are safest in the hands of Black birth workers.
So the question becomes: What can be done to ensure that every Black birthing person has access to this equitable form of care?
Read the full story and learn more about BElovedBIRTH’s Black Centering.