THE NECESSARY EQUATION: Birth Equity and the African American Family
Father + Mother = Healthy Baby
They can help reduce stress, promote breastfeeding and more, but in many African American communities, their involvement has been discouraged or compromised.
Addressing the infant mortality crisis nationwide, infant deaths are 2.5 times higher for black babies than white. Maternal stress during pregnancy has been associated with increased rates of preterm delivery. This is stress caused by chronic racism, poverty affect black women at a higher rate, and discrimination, which many black women face despite their socio-economic background. The risk of poor birth outcomes increases when an infant is born to black women whose babies fathers are absent during their pregnancy – making it necessary to systematically involve African American men to establish equity in birth outcomes.
Most maternal and child health programs seek to address the health needs of women and children by engaging and educating pregnant women and mothers. This focus on women, and a tendency to think about family planning, pregnancy, childbirth and child health as “women’s business,” has often led to men being excluded from spaces and services in which they could learn more about reproductive, maternal and child health.[1]
As we work to reduce infant mortality in high-risk communities, a platform is needed to develop leadership among men, build coalitions, and influence policy to enhance male involvement in the maternal and child arena. It is understood that generations of perniciousness, including false historical narrative characterizing black men as “uncommitted fathers,” even labels like “baby daddy,” has unfairly shaped the public perception of an entire population of people. This has been the motivation in part behind many government policies, such as mass incarceration, counterproductive welfare reform, zero tolerance and the school-to-prison pipeline, which have played a major role in destabilizing the black family in America.
There are studies that report outcomes related to the potential benefits of greater male involvement for maternal and newborn health, which includes improved maternal mental health, increased breast feeding, timely immunizations, reduce childhood illness, as well as a positive impact on men’s own health. Although there has been increasing recognition of the need to include men in maternal and newborn health services since the mid-1990s, actual progress towards engaging men in maternal and child health has been a slow, developing process, according to a briefing paper from the Centre for International Health, Burnet Institute, Australia.
The role and impact of fatherhood programs has become clearer, and are of greater necessity than ever before. It is well known that innovations in practice often begin at the practitioner level. It takes several years before research catches up with new practices and begins to document successes and failures. As a result, individual agencies can serve as informal laboratories for innovation generating data to support policy recommendations, create a new generation of leaders, create opportunities, secure additional funding for research and interventions that are culturally sensitive, race-and gender-specific and designed to respond to the current black infant mortality crisis.
[1] Men and maternal and newborn health – Benefits, harms, challenges and potential strategies for engaging men (Jessica Davis, Stanley Luchters, Wendy Holmes, Centre of International Health, Burnet Institute, Australia, wpq3