Twelve days after the birth of my youngest son, my wife and I woke up at 2 a.m. in a pool of her blood. Under normal circumstances, a person would have likely traveled straight to the emergency room. At the time, however, there was nothing normal. My wife had just given birth, and so we were adjusting to the sleep and feeding cycle of a newborn, which meant whenever the child felt like it. On top of that, we were living in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We called our nurse’s hotline, and after a few questions, they told us to go to the emergency room. Upon arriving, my wife was seen quickly, but I could not accompany her due to the hospital policies during COVID-19. My wife had secondary (delayed) postpartum hemorrhaging, and the fear of her dying was very real. We are both Black, and while national infant mortality rates have been slowly improving, racial and income-related disparities remain poor.
And it’s likely to get worse.
The Trump administration’s policies and their vicious attacks on the social safety net system, the care that all women — and especially Black women — need is under attack. At the behest of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, funding has been stripped from the maternal and child health program Healthy Start. A further escalation of these attacks on maternal health happened during the government shutdown, the Trump administration laid off the entire office that administers the Healthy Start Program.
While the government may be open now, communication from the National Health Start Association CEO Deborah Frazier has indicated that the office may not be operating at full capacity.
Healthy Start is a maternal and child health program that focuses on communities whose infant mortality rates (death of a baby before their first birthday) are at least 1.5 times worse than the U.S. national average. Healthy Start sees about 85,000 people nationwide a year.
This program started in the George H.W. Bush administration from a 1989 task force to reduce infant mortality. It was a bipartisan initiative to address the disparities in infant deaths for Black women in comparison to white women around the country. There are 115 Healthy Start programs around the country, all located in areas that have an infant mortality rate 1.5-2 times the national average.
Healthy Start is effective. Participants at Healthy Start sites have infant mortality rates similar to the national average, despite their neighborhoods having worse outcomes. Healthy Start infant mortality rates have been improving year over year.
We need to reauthorize and fully fund Healthy Start now.
These programs play a critical role in the overall health and productivity of our country. These financial commitments should not be evaluated purely from a business evaluation perspective. These documents represent our moral commitments as a society, and the attack on these systems should be viewed as an attack on that moral commitment to the lives of Black and brown women and children.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “These moms don’t have lobbyists. They don’t have industry. And this (Healthy Start) reauthorization, while on its face may seem small, can really change a lot of people’s lives.”
Fast forward to the present: My wife and son are healthy. But because of that evening, it is unlikely we will be able to have another child. We are a dual PhD household, and without access to the resources we had, the outcome of that evening could have been very different. Millions of Americans are not as well-resourced.
Like the banks of an eroding river, the more that is lost, the faster the rest will continue to erode. The attacks against our health care system, the defunding of Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) premiums doubling — these represent a moral commitment to our society, and their defunding should be viewed as the prioritization of businesses and profits over people. These tax cuts are coming at the cost of programs like Healthy Start, SNAP, SNAP-Ed, Medicare and Medicaid.
This is not how our society should be shaped. Contact your elected officials today and let them know where you stand. Let them know that these financial cuts are also moral failings that history won’t forget. Stand up now and demand people over profits.