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Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced on Tuesday that her office is awarding $1.5 million in grants to 11 different organizations working to combat what Campbell says is a statewide maternal health crisis.
Cambell joined the grant recipients at Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury on Tuesday morning for a roundtable discussion on possible solutions to the vast racial disparities in the state’s maternal health outcomes.
“We each have a role to play in addressing the maternal health crisis in Massachusetts where, for example, Black birthing people experience the highest rates of labor and delivery complications compared to other races and ethnicities,” Campbell said at the event. “I’m proud that my office is leveraging its grant making tool to do exactly that.”
A ‘maternal health crisis’ in Mass.
Around the state, Black women are at a higher risk of severe maternal health complications than any other demographic group, and more than twice as likely as white women to experience complications, a July report by the Department of Public Health found.
The report drew on data from the 678,382 deliveries in Massachusetts between 2011 and 2020. It tracked “severe maternal morbidity” during those years, defined as unexpected complications in labor and delivery that impacted the health of the person giving birth in the short or long term. During that time, the gap in severe maternal morbidity rates between Black and white birthing people grew by 25%.
“These persistent disparities arise from inequities in care and access, social and economic factors, and the enduring effects of structural racism,” the report noted.
The report also found serious maternal health disparities for people with disabilities, people with opioid use disorders, and those with histories of incarceration or homelessness.
The report’s authors called for a state-level policy response to their findings.
“To improve peripartum health outcomes,” they concluded, “state policy efforts must continue to target structural racism and ableism, as well as other socioeconomic and community drivers of adverse maternal outcomes, including access to and quality of primary and prenatal care.”
About the Maternal Health Equity Grant
The attorney general’s office is distributing the $1.5 million through its Maternal Health Equity Grant, which “expands access to culturally competent group models of prenatal care, perinatal behavioral health support and breastfeeding” according to a statement. The grant is funded by settlements reached by the AGO.
Georgetown’s Health Policy Institute defines culturally competent care as the ability of providers to understand racial and ethnic health inequities and meet their patients’ social, cultural, and linguistic needs.
The funding announced Tuesday “will provide much-needed funds to nonprofit organizations across the state that have demonstrated their ability to tackle this ongoing crisis,” Campbell said on Tuesday. “Together, we are making clear that the safety and wellbeing of all those who give birth and parent matters and contributes to the health and success of all of us.”
Where is the money going?
The AGO awarded funding to 11 nonprofit organizations after a thorough review. Here’s a complete list of the recipients, and how they will use the funding:
- Berkshire Medical Center, for a collaboration with Berkshire Nursing Families and Springfield Family Doulas to “expand culturally competent maternal health support services for families in Berkshire County.”
- Caring Health Center, to expand the woman- and BIPOC-led organization’s sexual and reproductive health services.
- Cambridge Health Alliance Foundation, to rebuild its doula program.
- Cape Cod Children’s Place, to train its mental health clinicians to treat perinatal mood disorders, including postpartum depression.
- Community Servings, Inc., to expand a program for offering food and pre- and post-natal counseling to food-insecure pregnant people.
- Greater Lawrence Family Health Center, to expand its multilingual Centering Pregnancy Program.
- Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast, to subsidize the distribution of “safe and screened donor milk for diverse low-income communities.”
- Pernet Family Health Service, Inc., to train more multilingual staff to conduct postpartum depression screenings and become lactation consultants.
- Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital, to hire more multilingual staff for its Healthy Beginnings prenatal program
- Tufts University’s Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice, to create a toolkit for doulas and MassHealth clients seeking doula care.
- Whittier Street Health Center, to establish a Centering Parenting program for prenatal and postpartum care.
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