by Jennifer Porter Gore, Word in Black
A black mother and child, Chicago. – NARA – 556145.jpg
Mother’s Day, coming this weekend, is supposed to be a celebration of maternal love, but for too many Black women who have just delivered a baby, an ongoing health crisis overshadows the holiday.
Compared to white women, Black women are still far more likely to suffer pregnancy-related complications or die than the overall population in the United States.
The numbers, tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others, tell a stubborn story about a country that has not solved its maternal mortality problem. And increasingly, that story is as much about mental health as it is about physical care.
“For me, the headline is always: we have to wake up and pay attention to mental health when it comes to parents,” says Dr. Joy Baker, an OB-GYN practicing in rural Georgia.
“There’s so much happening with mental health among parents,” says Baker, one of the first physicians in the U.S. to earn special certification in perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, as well as treatment of addiction in pregnancy.
“We tend to focus more on the maternal component, but we also know that up to 75% of partners who are partnered with a person experiencing a mental health disorder will also have experienced a mood disorder,” she says.
The data backs her up. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that deaths tied to mental health conditions rose from 22.7% in 2021 to 27.7% in 2022. Suicide now accounts for roughly one in five pregnancy-related deaths, making it one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. For Black women, almost 17% of pregnancy-related deaths were due to mental health conditions–which is roughly double the rate from the year before.
At the same time, those same reviews found that nearly 18% of maternal deaths were linked to discrimination. That finding lands hard in a system where Black women already face higher risks than white women at nearly every stage of pregnancy and postpartum care.
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