Healthy Children Project is celebrating National Minority Health Month and Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17) with a free 60 minute module exploring cultural perspectives on breastfeeding titled Breastfeeding: The Impact of History on the Present Day Experience of Black Women in the United States.
The module, available until April 21, 2018, provides 1 contact hour for RNs, CLCs and IBCLCs.
Black Maternal Health Week is meant to bring increased awareness to racial gaps in maternal health while encouraging and enhancing life-saving solutions.
In light of Black Maternal Health Week, Rewire published Race Isn’t A Factor in Maternal Health. Racism Is. written by Dr. Joia Crear-Perry.
Dr. Crear-Perry is founder and president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative. Most recently, she addressed the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to urge a human rights framework to improve maternal mortality… Her love is her family; health equity is her passion; maternal and child health are her callings. [Retrieved from http://birthequity.org/about/about-the-founder-and-pres/]
Dr. Crear-Perry’s commentary urges us to shift our language and essence of the conversation around Black maternal health; Blackness is not the problem.
“Instead, we need to start telling the truth: It’s exposure to racism that is the risk factor,” Dr. Crear-Perry writes.
Read the full article here.
Read Healthy Children Project’s Executive Director Karin Cadwell’s, RN, RhD, ANLC, INCLC USBC Legacy Award Acceptance Speech which calls for recognition of structural racism here.
You can watch Dr. Cear-Perry speak to the crisis of the Black maternal mortality rate in the U.S. here.