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Two-month-old Cali French made her debut into the world on June 6 at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak.
Her mother, Brienna Ruff, said she weighed a little under 7 pounds and latched on to nurse “perfectly.”
Everything in little Cali’s life was going well, her mom said, until she took her daughter to get vaccinations at her second doctor’s appointment and a nurse dropped an oral vaccine down the infant’s throat.
“She started choking and couldn’t breathe “said Ruff, 19, of Detroit. “The nurse left … and we kept telling her pediatrician something was wrong and she said this was normal.”
Eventually, a different nurse came into the room and suctioned the baby’s airway, Ruff said.
That experience is what brought the Black mother to the Maternal Outcomes Matter Shower.
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched its official M.O.M.S. tour in Detroit. The event serves as a community baby shower giving out free resources for new and expecting moms, but its main purpose is to teach mothers how to advocate for themselves and their babies in order to reduce maternal mortality among Black, American Indian and Alaskan Natives.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women are three times more likely to die from something related to pregnancy than white women. American Native women are two times more likely.
LaToyia Dennis, the M.O.M.S tour manager and founder of A Chance to Learn, says these deaths are preventable. She said the tour is travelling to 50 urban and rural cities across the country to help with the prevention. It’s first stop happened in February in Washington, D.C., and Detroit was the first in partnership with the HHS.
“Every two minutes a mom dies in childbirth, or something related to pregnancy around the world” said Sonia Hassan, during a seminar at the shower. “Those numbers are going up and they’ve gone up in the last five years and Black women, are affected more than any other race.”
Hassan is the founder and director of the Office of Women’s Health at Wayne State University. In her role, she serves as the associate vice president and professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Wayne State University. Her research includes treatments and programming to reduce infant’s preterm birth.
“One in 10 babies are also born too early, said the professor. “Of those babies, every 40 seconds, one of those babies die.”
Dennis, 49, says she knows all too well what it feels like to have a preterm birth.
“I had five miscarriages within two years,” said Dennis. “After my fifth one, my doctor told me if I hadn’t made it there when I did, within 10 minutes later I would have died.”
Dennis says her doctor also never checked why she was miscarrying her babies and only told her that “Black women miscarry all the time.” So, she and her husband decided they wouldn’t have a baby she said. But everything changed when Dennis was convinced to go see a specialist that tested her and found out Dennis wasn’t producing the progesterone needed for a pregnant mother to carry full-term.
“My babies couldn’t live” she said.
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The specialist gave Dennis a progesterone pill the next time she got pregnant and Dennis had her baby.
“We named him Chance,” Dennis said of her 14-year old son. “And that was because God gave him a chance at life.”
During the shower, Black, American Indian and Alaskan Native expectant mothers were able to receive gifts that they would sometimes request for their own personal baby shower.
Portable bassinets, baby carrying systems and swings were raffled off and diaper bags filled with essentials for a baby were given away.
Black Mother’s Breastfeeding Association, The City of Detroit Health Department, Henry Ford Health Systems, Healthy Start and the Institute for Population Health were some of the many organizations on the premises giving away resources to parents.
Dennis says her point of starting the tour is to prevent another mother from having a same or similar experience as she did.
“If the other doctor would have just checked me for the reason I was miscarrying, I would have had my babies,” said the mother of one. “But it’s the implicit bias that ‘Black women miscarry all the time’ that kept her from testing me or my fetus.”
More:From car seat to booster: The laws, requirements Michigan parents should know
The mom also says she wished she knew what to ask the doctor when she had her first miscarriage or, how a doula or midwife could have helped advocate for her concerns.
Other speakers at the seminar educating the parents varied from doctors, doula’s, nurses and Detroit City Council.
“I needed to be heard” “They don’t listen to us and “I wish we had better pediatricians and more patient nurses” were all the sentiments consistently being sounded off during the storytelling portion of the seminar.
For Ruff though, who also told her story on the panel, her cry out was simple:
“Our pediatricians don’t listen.”
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