Throw the Babies Overboard
September 20, 2009
| Throw The Babies Overboard...
The Black Ones First |
CMC
Pictured above healthy San Francisco Black Infant Health Babies,
Twin sisters- Trinity and Serenity Chambers at birth and more recently.
Initially this disparity was thought to be a problem of access to health care but further study revealed that the infant mortality disparity between Blacks and the mainstream population was much more complex than that. It wasn't quite as simple as just getting a Black woman into care in her first trimester of pregnancy. There were some historical factors that had to be taken into consideration. Historical factors like 400 years of chattel slavery, another 100 years of Jim Crow segregation, no health care, inadequate health care, indifferent health care-- lots of complex factors that communicated to any Black woman birthing a baby in America, hostile territory ahead. In fact so hostile and stressful that a college educated married Black woman with private health insurance has the same chance as a single white woman with a high school diploma of having a premature low birth weight baby.
Though no program can single handedly turn that historical tide around. The Black Infant Health program has more than earned its keep. It has demonstrated its effectiveness; the program saves lives and taxpayer dollars, period. Not only do they provide valuable educational information, they help women navigate through difficult and ever-changing systems, they leverage community support, they help stabilize families in that critical and fragile peri-natal period. They provide safe harbor on a rough sea. In addition this program draws down a federal match, every dollar the state spends is matched by the feds. This match will be lost if not spent on Black Infant Health.
Are things really so bad in our economy that we are willing to push our Black babies and their families out of the lifeboat? To let people sink or swim according to their will to survive. What about the City and County of San Francisco, are we willing to cut these programs for a small short-term savings? A short-term savings that will be eaten up with the costs of the births and the subsequent care of the additional premature babies who are sure to come. These shortsighted cuts will have immediate and long-term economic and social repercussions?
Several years ago San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom created a task force to address the city's ever shrinking African American population. At this point the remaining Blacks in San Francisco wouldn't fill Candlestick Park. It doesn't take a task force to figure out that if the City of San Francisco really wants to help Black people stay in San Francisco they need to find the funding to help them come into the world alive and healthy.
Carol McGruder
Friends of Black Infant Health
cmcgruder@usa.net
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