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Las Madres Black Infant Health Fundraiser

Claire F Baylis | Published on 7/9/2020

Las Madres fundraiser and support of Black Infant Health Santa Clara County

One of the goals of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee is to help Las Madres support a diverse range of organizations that are still within our mission of supporting families and young children.
The first organization we’re going to serve is Black Infant Health (BIH) of Santa Clara County.

WHY BLACK INFANT HEALTH IS SO IMPORTANT

According to the California Health Care Foundation:
  1. One in four in-hospital births in California were low-risk, first-birth cesareans (c-sections). Rates for Black women were six percentage points higher than the Healthy People 2020 goal (23.9%) while rates for Latina and white women met this goal. While critical in some circumstances, c-sections can pose serious risks for baby and mother.
  2. While the national maternal mortality rate has increased, California has made significant progress in reducing maternal mortality rates overall, and for all race/ethnicity and age groups. However, Black women continued to have significantly higher maternal mortality rates than other groups.
  3. Significant racial/ethnic disparities existed across a variety of maternal quality measures in California, including prenatal visits, preterm births, and maternal and infant mortality rates. For many of these measures, Black women and infants fared worse than their peers in other racial/ethnic groups. In a recent survey, more than one in five California women who identify as Black and gave birth in 2016 or 2017 reported symptoms of prenatal or postpartum depression.
(https://www.chcf.org/publication/2019-edition-maternity-care-in-california/)
Black Infant Health seeks to:
· Empower women, build resilience, and reduce stress
· Promote healthy behaviors to support health, wellness, and relationships
· Promote healthy relationships, and enhance bonding and parenting skills
· Connect women with medical, social, and mental health services
· Engage communities to raise awareness and support BIH efforts to improve outcomes for

BLACK WOMEN AND THEIR FAMILIES

Though the goal of the BIH program is to reduce infant mortality, services have been expanded to target the needs of the entire family. This is done through a multidisciplinary team of public health nurses, mental health professionals, health educators, and family health advocates who provide comprehensive case management and other services to Black women who are pregnant.

BREASTFEEDING AFTER A HISTORY OF TRAUMA

The legacies of terror, oppression, and gendered dehumanization still impact the ancestors of those who survived the vast grief of enslavement. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities reported in 2019 that 64.3% of Black American parents breastfed, in comparison to 81.9% of Latino and 81.5% of White parents breastfeeding. The enduring legacies of slavery are part of this equation. Certified Nurse Midwife Stephanie Devane-Johnson of Greensboro, North Carolina conducted research as to why Black women weren’t breastfeeding and found that, “The echoes of slave women being forced to give up their milk still resounded. And black women didn’t talk to their sisters, daughters and granddaughters about how to feed their babies; the bottle was just assumed. And for some women, breast-feeding was a ‘white thing.’” Black Infant Health seeks to change that.

HOW WILL THE LAS MADRES COMMUNITY BE SERVING THEM?

Black Infant Health of Santa Clara County is hoping to start a lending library for baby and toddler carriers and we’d like to help them get that started. As many of us know, life with a baby becomes so much easier when we’re able to have free hands. Carriers help us get back into the world and we believe are an essential item when managing life with a baby. But they can also be cost prohibitive as many of them cost over $100 each. If you want to help there are two options: please send money to the Las Madres’s Paypal (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4CQ4SE8SR2RQ6&source=url) or purchase an item from their amazon registry (https://www.amazon.com/baby-reg/lasmadresblackinfanthealth-august-2020-santaclara/X2D4U0OZ5RGG) We have a goal of $1500 (less than $3 per member) to help buy about 10 baby carriers for the Black Infant Health lending library and other birth or infant materials that BIH needs from the registry. Thank you so much!

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