The Crisis in the Crib--A Call to Action

Every year 8,000 African American children die during their first year of life.

Every year 8,000 African American children die during their first year of life.

Every year 8,000 African American children die during their first year of life.

These words rang in my ears as I viewed an unfortunately rare documentary, The Crisis in the Crib, produced by Tonya Lewis Lee, the wife of famed movie maker, Spike Lee. The documentary addressed the staggering infant mortality rate affecting the Black community. Black babies are twice as likely to die in the first year of life  than white babies. My heart ached for the mothers. My heart ached for the fathers. My heart ached as I looked in the faces of my own 3 children, and thought to myself, “It could have been you.” And as tears streamed down my face, my mind settled on one thought –And what are you going to do about it?

As a childbirth educator, I am continuously immersed in the details of labor, delivery, interventions, etc. I now believe so much immersed that I missed the point. I got caught up in home vs hospital. Miss Passion for Birth was lost in the quest for promoting water birth as a gentler, kinder delivery, distracted by which baby carrier is best. All topics certainly worth my attention, but still I totally missed the mark. Black women are in need of the knowledge to keep their babies ALIVE.

Here’s what I (and we) can do to address the issues I view as paramount:

• I will educate women on the importance of improving our overall health before conception with special attention on reducing stress. Research has found that the stress of racism affects the birth outcomes of Black women.
•I will work to restore the Black family structure thus ending the Baby Mama epidemic. Fathers/Husbands are important, and recent research has proven it.
•I will utilize speaking engagements to stop the prevalence of SIDS in our community. Black babies are more than two times as likely to die of SIDS than white babies.
•I will promote breastfeeding as a means of ensuring the health of our babies for the first year of life and beyond.

Lastly, in the documentary as apart of the  A Healthy Baby Begins with You campaign, we saw the mobilization and empowerment of college students as ambassadors of health and childbirth education in the Memphis community. Genius. Sheer Genius. In an age where the media perception of  Black youth strikes fear in the hearts of most, to see beautiful young Black men and women hit the streets, going door to door imploring their peers to take a stand for their health and the health of our communities' unborn blessings brought me so much pride. Another action item is to replicate this program in cooperation with local maternal-fetal health groups.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore these crucial actions items more extensively and share what I’m doing to wage war against the unnecessary death of Black babies.

This post was inspired by a mini blog carnival sponsored by The Unnecesarean.