Birthing

Community of Hope supports D.C. families with housing and healthcare in the four quadrants of the city, which was highlighted in the film.

The film shows two sides of the world of maternal health for Black women. On one hand, too often, Black expectant mothers are not listened to when they approach their healthcare providers with serious concerns or questions on the status of their pregnancy. Dr. Donna Adams Pickett in Augusta, Georgia said she was dismayed by how easily she and women who look like her are dismissed.

Dr. Pickett had a patient that she saw was abrupting (when the placenta pulls away from the uterine lining before the time of delivery). Yet, she had to convince the anesthesiologist why they needed to do a C-section, emergently, as opposed to urgently. The anesthesiologist walked past Dr. Pickett in the room, and went to the nurse and asked, “why are we doing this emergently?” Dr. Pickett had to go to the fetal tracing monitor, point to the pattern and say, “this is an abruption pattern.” Pickett said in the film, it frustrated her that after more than 21 years of practice, she had to justify advocating for her patients.

The Birthing Justice team has taken a grassroots approach to this crisis. By hosting small screenings and panels all across the nation and by facilitating home screenings — with support via questionnaires, discussion topics and how to host a panel discussion — they aim to activate a movement.

There’s an 11-bill legislative package making its way through Congress called the

Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act — a package spearheaded by the congressional Black Maternal Health Caucus that includes policy proposals to address the racism and inequities at the root of the Black maternal health crisis in the U.S. The Protecting Moms Who Served Act became the first of the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act bills that passed in November 2021. Nine of the remaining 11 Momnibus bills were included in the text of the Build Back Better Act, which passed the House in November 2021. The Build Back Better Act is currently stalled in the Senate amidst ongoing negotiations.

Matthews said solving this crisis takes a multipronged approach. Highlighting exciting progress on the Black maternal healthcare front, Birthing Justice focused on the complete turnaround of Los Angeles’ Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital or MLKCH.

“[MLKCH] is now one of the [most] successful birthing hospitals in the country,” Matthews said. “It has a distinguished award (international Baby-Friendly designation), a very hard designation to get and it’s a model for how we can turn this around in a hospital setting.

“We want to encourage people to see [the film] and call their representative because it’s important to them,” she said. “If we don’t, then the reality is the majority of the bills may die. One of the things we want to get across is what Dr. Kanika Harris said, ‘there’s nothing that Black women are doing that is so different than what other women are doing.’ [What] I want to make clear is that [this] is not an individualized problem, it’s systemic so, we want to address it systemically.”

To read the full story online go to: https:// tinyurl.com/4fktw632

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