Report Publish Date: August 1, 2024
This journal article investigates the fact that Black women in the United States are much more likely than White women to have babies who are born too early and too small. The authors try to measure how much structural racism contributes to those disparities.
Measures used as proxies for structural racism accounted for about half the underlying disparities between the health of babies of Black moms and White moms. Living in a neighborhood with more advantages benefited Black moms and their babies more than it did White moms and their babies.
There are large and persistent differences between Black mothers and White mothers in their rates of preterm birth and low birth weight babies. These differences can’t be explained by socioeconomic status: Wealthy Black moms have poorer outcomes than low-income White moms.
The authors of this study wanted to find a way to measure the impact of structural racism on birth outcomes for Black mothers and their babies.
The authors used vital statistics from 2007 to 2018, looking only at births of singleton babies before the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers used several measures as proxies for structural racism and separately looked at preterm birth and low birth weight trends for Black mothers and White mothers. They used multivariate analysis to assess how the measures affected the total disparity between White and Black infants.
"White and Black mothers live in areas with different levels of structural racism and advantages and have different levels of education and rates of marriage, as well as different distributions of age and parity. Each of these factors is strongly associated with birth outcomes.”
—Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Loyola University; LIsa Dubay, Emily Johnston, Vincent Pancini, Urban Institute
The authors say giving Black people the same advantages as White people is not enough to ensure Black moms have the same chance as white moms to birth healthy, safe babies. "Instead,” they write, “policies need to target multiple systems and be tailored to the specific needs of Black people and other people of color.”
Decades of disparities in health between infants born to Black and White mothers have persisted in recent years, despite policy initiatives to improve maternal and reproductive health for Black mothers. Although scholars have increasingly recognized the critical role that structural racism plays in driving health outcomes for Black people, measurement of this relationship remains challenging. This study examines trends in preterm birth and low birth weight between 2007 and 2018 separately for births to Black and White mothers. Using a multivariate regression model, we evaluated potential factors, including an index of racialized disadvantage as well as community- and individual-level factors that serve as proxy measures for structural racism, that may contribute to White–Black differences in infant health. Finally, we assessed whether unequal effects of these factors may explain differences in birth outcomes. We found that differences in the effects of these factors appear to explain about half of the underlying disparity in infant health
Health Affairs Scholar, 2024, 2(8), qxae092. https://doi.org/10.1093/haschl/qxae092
This study and journal article were conducted and created by the following people:
