Racism is fueling a national health crisis.
After she lost her son, Tonda Thompson dreamed of a baby in a washing machine. She’d stuffed in dirty clothes and closed the door. The lock clicked shut. Water rushed in. Then she saw him, floating behind the glass. Frantic, she jabbed at a keypad on the machine, searching for a code to unlock the door.
When Thompson became pregnant she was 25, living in Los Angeles and working as a model. She and her boyfriend got engaged and moved back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She’d grown up on the city’s north side, a predominantly African-American neighborhood with pockets of deep poverty, in a zip code known for having the highest incarceration rate in the United States. Thompson went to all of her medical appointments, took prenatal vitamins, and stayed in shape. On her birthday, she wrote on Facebook that the only gift she wanted was “a healthy mom and baby.” But she also wrote about how hard it was to be pregnant in a city where there was “nothing to do that’s fun and safe.”
Thompson got married in April 2013, and a month later went into labor. Forty hours later, Terrell was born. He lived less than half that time, due to “complications” with the delivery. By the time Thompson got home, all of the baby’s things had been moved to the basement. She’d gotten to hold him for five minutes.
Thompson sank into a depression. She thought about suicide. On her birthday, she received divorce papers; by the next summer, she was on the verge of homelessness. She often felt angry that the hospital didn’t save her son. But mostly she asked herself, “What did I do wrong?”
Each year in the United States, more than 23,000 infants die before reaching their first birthday. Though the mortality rate varies widely by state and county, the average in the United States is higher than in the rest of the world’s wealthy countries, worse than in Poland and Slovakia. Because infants are so vulnerable, their survival is considered a benchmark for a society’s overall health. What our infant-mortality rate tells us is that, despite spending more money on health care than any other country in the world, the United States is not very healthy. Looked at closely, it reveals that particular groups of Americans are starkly unwell.
White, educated American women lose their infants at rates similar to mothers in America’s peer countries. Most of the burden of the higher mortality rate here is borne by poorer, less-educated families, particularly those headed by unmarried or black women. Across the United States, black infants die at a rate that’s more than twice as high as that of white infants. The disparity is acute in a number of booming urban areas, from San Francisco—where black mothers are more than six times as likely to lose infants as white mothers—to Washington, DC. In the capital’s Ward 8, which is the poorest in the city and over 93 percent black, the infant-mortality rate is 10 times what it is in the affluent, predominantly white Ward 3.
The year that Terrell died, a mother in war-torn Libya had better odds of celebrating her child’s first birthday than Thompson did. Milwaukee has one of the worst infant-mortality rates of all major urban centers in the United States, and the racial gap is threefold. (Four other Rust Belt cities count among the 10 with the highest rates of infant death: Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Columbus.) Over the past decade, more than 100 babies, at least 60 of them black, have died in Milwaukee each year, about two-thirds of them because they were born early or small.
Bevan Baker, Milwaukee’s commissioner of health, is one of the people trying to reverse the trend. “If 100 people died from tuberculosis, then you would have a whole different approach,” Baker said. “People would say we have a public-health emergency.” His department, working with a coalition of groups, is trying to respond with the same urgency that it would to a deadly infectious disease. The city has declared infant mortality to be a primary health priority and, in 2011, set a goal of reducing the overall rate by 10 percent, and the black rate by 15 percent, by the end of this year.
For many years, researchers have asked the same question that Thompson asked herself: What are black mothers doing wrong? Common answers included eating poorly; being overweight or diabetic; smoking or drinking during pregnancy; not going to the doctor; not being married; getting pregnant too young; or smothering their newborns in their sleep. In the 1980s, health officials began focusing on access to prenatal care as a way to reduce these perceived risk factors. The result, said Dr. Michael Lu, an ob-gyn and leading infant-mortality researcher, was more women getting care, but little improvement in birth outcomes. Instead, the racial gap grew. Black women who received prenatal care starting in the first trimester were still losing children at higher rates than white women who never saw a doctor during their pregnancies.
By the late 1990s, the field was at a crossroads. Lu said, “We’d dedicated the last two decades to trying to improve on access to prenatal care, but if prenatal care is not the answer, then what?” Some researchers suggested that black women were genetically predisposed to poor birth outcomes, and began to hunt for “preterm birth genes.” At the time, pharmaceutical companies were exploring race-specific drugs, and the public-health community was embroiled in a broader debate about whether race is a genetic category. That debate hasn’t fully died out. But we now know that genetic variation among humans is tiny and doesn’t correspond neatly with racial categories. If preterm birth genes did exist, we would expect to see poor outcomes for black women everywhere, but studies have found that foreign-born black women living in the United States have birth outcomes almost identical to white American women’s.
Other researchers suggested that poverty and lack of education were to blame, as black women consistently experience higher poverty levels. Those factors matter, but they don’t account for the full racial gap. After evaluating 46 different factors, alone and in combination—including smoking, employment status, and education—the authors of one 1997 study could account for less than 10 percent of the variation in birth weight between black and white babies. Another study found that even black women with advanced degrees—doctors, lawyers, MBAs—were more likely to lose infants than white women who hadn’t graduated from high school.
Continue to full article here: What's Killing America’s Black Infants?
After she lost her son, Tonda Thompson dreamed of a baby in a washing machine. She’d stuffed in dirty clothes and closed the door. The lock clicked shut. Water rushed in. Then she saw him, floating behind the glass. Frantic, she jabbed at a keypad on the machine, searching for a code to unlock the door.
When Thompson became pregnant she was 25, living in Los Angeles and working as a model. She and her boyfriend got engaged and moved back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She’d grown up on the city’s north side, a predominantly African-American neighborhood with pockets of deep poverty, in a zip code known for having the highest incarceration rate in the United States. Thompson went to all of her medical appointments, took prenatal vitamins, and stayed in shape. On her birthday, she wrote on Facebook that the only gift she wanted was “a healthy mom and baby.” But she also wrote about how hard it was to be pregnant in a city where there was “nothing to do that’s fun and safe.”
Thompson got married in April 2013, and a month later went into labor. Forty hours later, Terrell was born. He lived less than half that time, due to “complications” with the delivery. By the time Thompson got home, all of the baby’s things had been moved to the basement. She’d gotten to hold him for five minutes.
Thompson sank into a depression. She thought about suicide. On her birthday, she received divorce papers; by the next summer, she was on the verge of homelessness. She often felt angry that the hospital didn’t save her son. But mostly she asked herself, “What did I do wrong?”
Each year in the United States, more than 23,000 infants die before reaching their first birthday. Though the mortality rate varies widely by state and county, the average in the United States is higher than in the rest of the world’s wealthy countries, worse than in Poland and Slovakia. Because infants are so vulnerable, their survival is considered a benchmark for a society’s overall health. What our infant-mortality rate tells us is that, despite spending more money on health care than any other country in the world, the United States is not very healthy. Looked at closely, it reveals that particular groups of Americans are starkly unwell.
White, educated American women lose their infants at rates similar to mothers in America’s peer countries. Most of the burden of the higher mortality rate here is borne by poorer, less-educated families, particularly those headed by unmarried or black women. Across the United States, black infants die at a rate that’s more than twice as high as that of white infants. The disparity is acute in a number of booming urban areas, from San Francisco—where black mothers are more than six times as likely to lose infants as white mothers—to Washington, DC. In the capital’s Ward 8, which is the poorest in the city and over 93 percent black, the infant-mortality rate is 10 times what it is in the affluent, predominantly white Ward 3.
The year that Terrell died, a mother in war-torn Libya had better odds of celebrating her child’s first birthday than Thompson did. Milwaukee has one of the worst infant-mortality rates of all major urban centers in the United States, and the racial gap is threefold. (Four other Rust Belt cities count among the 10 with the highest rates of infant death: Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Columbus.) Over the past decade, more than 100 babies, at least 60 of them black, have died in Milwaukee each year, about two-thirds of them because they were born early or small.
Bevan Baker, Milwaukee’s commissioner of health, is one of the people trying to reverse the trend. “If 100 people died from tuberculosis, then you would have a whole different approach,” Baker said. “People would say we have a public-health emergency.” His department, working with a coalition of groups, is trying to respond with the same urgency that it would to a deadly infectious disease. The city has declared infant mortality to be a primary health priority and, in 2011, set a goal of reducing the overall rate by 10 percent, and the black rate by 15 percent, by the end of this year.
For many years, researchers have asked the same question that Thompson asked herself: What are black mothers doing wrong? Common answers included eating poorly; being overweight or diabetic; smoking or drinking during pregnancy; not going to the doctor; not being married; getting pregnant too young; or smothering their newborns in their sleep. In the 1980s, health officials began focusing on access to prenatal care as a way to reduce these perceived risk factors. The result, said Dr. Michael Lu, an ob-gyn and leading infant-mortality researcher, was more women getting care, but little improvement in birth outcomes. Instead, the racial gap grew. Black women who received prenatal care starting in the first trimester were still losing children at higher rates than white women who never saw a doctor during their pregnancies.
By the late 1990s, the field was at a crossroads. Lu said, “We’d dedicated the last two decades to trying to improve on access to prenatal care, but if prenatal care is not the answer, then what?” Some researchers suggested that black women were genetically predisposed to poor birth outcomes, and began to hunt for “preterm birth genes.” At the time, pharmaceutical companies were exploring race-specific drugs, and the public-health community was embroiled in a broader debate about whether race is a genetic category. That debate hasn’t fully died out. But we now know that genetic variation among humans is tiny and doesn’t correspond neatly with racial categories. If preterm birth genes did exist, we would expect to see poor outcomes for black women everywhere, but studies have found that foreign-born black women living in the United States have birth outcomes almost identical to white American women’s.
Other researchers suggested that poverty and lack of education were to blame, as black women consistently experience higher poverty levels. Those factors matter, but they don’t account for the full racial gap. After evaluating 46 different factors, alone and in combination—including smoking, employment status, and education—the authors of one 1997 study could account for less than 10 percent of the variation in birth weight between black and white babies. Another study found that even black women with advanced degrees—doctors, lawyers, MBAs—were more likely to lose infants than white women who hadn’t graduated from high school.
Continue to full article here: What's Killing America’s Black Infants?
