A forum in Charlotte on Tuesday focused on providing Black women the tools to handle their health through pregnancy and childbirth and finding ways the health care system can better support them.
Black women are two to three times more likely to die from complications due to pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Knowing that statistic, Deja Stover and her partner attended the forum to ensure they receive the best care to support her and the baby. Stover is due any day now. She hired a doula to help guide her through pregnancy and childbirth.
“That’s someone who I have been working with since I was maybe four months pregnant,” Stover said. “So, I feel I have a better idea, a better understanding of how to approach advocacy for myself, how to approach handling physicians that may want to implement practices that I’m not comfortable with.”
Doulas and midwives can be a big help in making sure women deal with emotions and questions they have around pregnancy, said several panelists. The group included physicians, mental health workers and a lactation consultant.
The conversation was hosted by the Reimagining America Project, a local group founded to address issues of race and discrimination, in partnership with other local organizations: the Coalition for Truth & Reconciliation, Health Care Justice-North Carolina, and the League of Women Voters of Charlotte Mecklenburg.
Atrium OB/GYN Pamela Cobb was one of the panelists. Her work focuses on underserved populations. Speaking afterward, she said there’s not one clear answer to why the odds for Black women are so much worse.
“It could be because the lived experience for Black women puts them at higher risk for having poor outcomes, “Cobb said. “The lived experience of racism for Black women can put them at higher risk for preterm birth, for having small babies, for having hypertensive disorders.”
More than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, according to the CDC. To prevent more deaths, Cobb said it’s vital that doctors listen and tailor care to patients’ backgrounds.
“There’s a lot of safety bundles that are put in place that say to a doctor, ‘If a woman has this blood pressure, we need to do this; if a woman has this blood count, we need to do this,’” Cobb said “And while I understand that it’s important to make care unified and equal, that is not necessarily care that is equitable. Equitable means I see a woman for who she is and take into account her life experience and what she’s saying to me about her body.”
Doctors are using an approach aimed at building relationships. It involves getting a group of patients together with their doctor for an extended time. Cobb said that can be an effective way to support women.
“I can see a group of ten women who culturally have a lot of the same experiences and may all be about the same gestational age, and we can really organically talk for two hours about what's going on in their lives,” Cobb said. “We can address medical problems and do education, but we also can establish more of a physician-patient connection.”
Stover said she feels more assured about her pregnancy with the support of her doula and the information provided in the forum. Still, she has started making plans in case something goes wrong with her pregnancy.
“It’s even a conversation that I had today with my doula about setting up an advance directive and a living will because we just know the realities of what can happen despite being as prepared as we want to be,” Stover said.
The Reimagining America Project plans to host another forum on Jan. 30 to explore what can be done at the state and federal levels to improve Black maternal health.
