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Birthing Project USA will kick off its National Awareness Campaign, sponsored by Nene’s Secret Hair Care Products, at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Spelman College. The event, free to the public, is being hosted by Spelman’s Student Health Advocacy Peer Educators or SHAPE.
Decades have passed since I signed on with Kathryn Hall-Trujillo and the sister-friends who make up the Birthing Project. For all that time, we’ve been mentoring pregnant African-American teens, chipping away at a grim statistic: the very high infant mortality rate among black mothers.
It might surprise most people, but I’m part of that statistic.
Soon after my marriage in 1985, I learned I was pregnant. Within four weeks I miscarried my baby.
To some of you, a four-week-old fetus is hardly a baby, but stay with me. Perhaps we can have that argument another day.
After the miscarriage, my ob/gyn suggested that before we try again my husband and I wait a year to give my body time to heal.
We did that, and on Mar. 4, 1989, our oldest daughter, Jamila, weighed in at 5 lbs. 5 oz. She was more than two pounds lighter than the average baby — in keeping with yet another troubling trend.
Kathryn was a health adviser with the State of California when she embarked upon this journey 25 years ago. It hit her then that infant mortality wasn’t just words strung together. Infant mortality meant dead babies.
“As a health care professional and a grandmother I have witnessed our country slip from 14th in infant mortality to 49,” she said.
She left her state job and formed the nonprofit Birthing Project USA. To date, the organization has given support and guidance to women who went on to bear more than 13,000 healthy babies in seven countries.
“We do one thing really well,” Kathryn said. “We invite, train and support community volunteers to provide information, guidance and social support to pregnant women.”
Initially the project’s focus was teenagers, mostly poor, mostly transient. In recent years, however, we’ve expanded to include college-educated professionals like me.
Outside of giving birth to and raising my own daughters, it’s been some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.
So I was happy to learn that Kathryn will begin a national awareness campaign this week, beginning here Wednesday at Spelman College. On this 25th anniversary tour, she is aiming her message at men and women like me, who despite our college degrees and higher socioeconomic status, are not immune to the lingering disparity between black and white birth outcomes.
Nationally, the mortality rate for all babies is 6.1 percent. The rate for African-American babies is 11.6 percent.
In Georgia, the infant mortality rate is 6.4 percent for all babies but 9.1 percent for African-American babies. Black women are also much more likely than other women to die in childbirth.
That would be easier to explain if the problems were confined to women at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. But they’re not.
“It has been well documented … that socioeconomic status does not protect African-American women from poor birth outcomes,” Kathryn said.
Researchers are just beginning to examine why that is, but stress seems to be the biggest culprit. In my years as a volunteer, I’ve seen that stress pinch the lives of the women I’ve mentored in ways big and small.
I think now of Larasha, who at 15 was on her second pregnancy and, after her grandmother suddenly died, on her own. She wasn’t old enough to secure her own housing, so I found a pro bono attorney willing to file for emancipation on her behalf. I recruited my husband to deliver our daughters’ twin beds and a few other household items to help her get her footing. That was more than 20 years ago; Larasha is doing well now.
So, too, is Doris, who was living in a hotel room on Fulton Industrial Blvd. with her mother and aunt, when we met four years ago.After her baby was born, Doris was unable to return to Washington High School and enrolled in Job Corps instead. She completed the program and the last time we talked she told me they were finally able to move from the hotel room and into an apartment.
She said she wanted to study nursing at Perimeter College. I hope she’s doing that. I hope she will track me down soon, because I can’t find her. The cell number she called me from no longer works.
That happens a lot with these girls because so much about their lives is tenuous and so I find myself praying a lot, wishing them the best, because that’s all I can do.
Maybe that’s why Kathryn always insists volunteers make wishes for the babies, starting well before they’re born. For years, that struck me as a futile exercise.
Then in 1998 seated at a sold-out Larnelle Harris concert on Valentine’s Day, watching little seedlings pop on a screen and Harris sang about his own daughter, the exercise of making a wish for an unborn child made all the sense in the world.
I remembered the hope I held for my own daughters, Asha and Jamila. From the moment I knew they were inside me, I prayed for their safe arrival. I wished for them good health, happiness, fulfilling work, financial stability and someone to share it all with, someone who could embrace the dreams they would dream for themselves. I still do.
I think I finally understand what Kathryn was trying to get me to see: the timeless values of family and community; that that one doesn’t have to birth a child to be a parent. All it takes is a heart big enough to love and a faith strong enough to hope for things we can’t yet see.
That’s really how we build community. Isn’t it?
