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Black Maternal Health Week — April 11-17 — not only works to raise awareness about the health challenges affecting Black women and mothers across the United States, but is a national campaign that seeks to combat health disparities African Americans face overall.
Inspired by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance (BMMA), a group of birth and reproductive justice organizations driving research and advocacy for Black mothers, the weeklong campaign prioritizes Black women’s well-being, while working towards a more equitable and inclusive health care system.
“The time is NOW to demand for comprehensive public and private insurance coverage for maternal, sexual, and reproductive health care; improving access to care across geographies and birth settings,” according to the BMMA website.
This year, BMMA’s national Black Maternal Health Week theme is “Our Bodies STILL Belong to Us: Reproductive Justice NOW!”
Maternal mortality rates among African American women remain disproportionately high.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women rank three times more likely to suffer fatalities from a pregnancy-related cause compared to white women. Further, there are many factors that contribute to Black maternal health disparities including: “variation in quality healthcare, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism, and implicit bias,” according to the CDC.
Mamatoto Village, the District’s only Black maternal health center located east of the River, works to lessen disparities and equip families with essential tools to strengthen health and parenting outcomes by providing accessible perinatal support services.
Aza Nedhari, executive director and co-founder of Mamatoto Village, underscored the value of quality physician care over location of health care services when aiming to achieve equitable health care outcomes.
“It’s not necessarily about the place that people are getting care, it’s about the person who is offering that care. What that person brings– their biases, their discriminations, their lived experiences—that influences how they’re going to treat the person on the other side,” Nedhari told The Informer. “Even if you have [only] 20 minutes to devote to providing care, you can actually be a really active, assertive and attentive listener, make that person feel like they are the most important person, and that 20 minutes will literally feel like an hour because you gave them what they needed in that moment. Hospitals are just made up of people, and so what we’re really talking about are problematic people who are providing health care and causing harm.”
Nedhari emphasized the historic prevalence of high maternal mortality rates among Black mothers, far beyond the rising attention to the Black maternal health crisis within recent years.
“This is an old issue. In the past five to 10 years, there has been an explosion of media content and discourse around Black maternal health, much more than it’s ever been in the past. That doesn’t mean that people haven’t been in the trenches working on this issue for the past 50 years,” Nedhari said. “We are seeing the symptoms of what it looks like to exist in a system of racism, white supremacy, and the health experiences of Black people, Black women, [and] Black children are collateral damage from that.”
Celebrating Black Maternal Health Week Locally, Continuing Advocacy
Mamatoto Village will tap into Black Maternal Health Week 2024 with the theme “Our Bodies, Our Joy,” with plenty of programming celebrating women’s health, educating families, and encouraging the right to women’s bodily autonomy.
“We are kicking it off with a virtual birth planning workshop led by our perinatal care coordinators, Shannon and Aspen, [who are] going to teach attendees how to create a birth plan, understanding their birth rights, questions to ask their providers, and other important things,” said Mariah Oates, Mamatoto Village’s director of Communications and Development. “The beauty about our birth planning workshop that might be different from others, is that we’re coming with a community cultural perspective. We just want to make sure that new and expecting parents are informed and able to make the best decisions for themselves.”
The birth planning workshop will be followed by a host of events including a community fill-a-bag day, providing maternity essentials of diapers, baby clothes, breastfeeding items and more, along with virtual panels and workshops to provide maternal health and parenting tips for mothers and families alike.
Nedheri said she also looks forward to continuing uplifting Black women and families through Black Maternal Health Week.
“I’m really excited about celebrating the joy of motherhood. There’s a place and space for us to continue this discourse around Black maternal health and we [also] cannot lose sight that Black women and Black families are parenting in joy. They are experiencing pregnancy from a joyful place,” the Mamatoto Village executive director emphasized.
This Black Maternal Health Week will be about digging into joy to combat challenges.
“Our workshops are about the celebration of that joy, because joy and rage can exist in the same place. We can have celebration and resistance, and it does not have to all be about gloom and doom,” Nedhari continued. “The only way so many of us have been able to continue living and continue fighting throughout the annals of history is because we’ve done it with joy and celebration.”
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