Birthing Justice : Black Women, Pregnancy And Childbirth, By Julia Chineyere Oparah And Alicia D. Bonaparte Essay

The readings this week solidified many long standing questions that I’ve had about the healthcare system, and further proved to me just how flawed it is. The introduction and chapter four from The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr established a framework and common language surrounding how the current healthcare system came to be. The introduction specifically heavily focused on the concept of authority and how cultural and societal authority differ and work to strengthen an individual's power. Following this intro, the fourth chapter serves to provide the reader with baseline historical context on how hospitals and physicians have evolved from voluntary institutions into for-profit corporations. Using these chapters as foundational knowledge Gambles chapter gains new nuances to the need for Black hospitals to be established, and the competing forces that were at work to ensure their failure.

In order to analyze this project objectively, research will be presented from various academic sources. The institute of medicine (IOM) has done extensive research, at the request of the United States Congress, on the various disparities within healthcare. Their analysis looks at differences in treatment, patient perception, and how individuals of different races and genders act while receiving care. Furthermore, I have out in an inquiry to St. Lukes Hospital, a member of the greater Lehigh Valley Heath Network, to see what type of data they may have on the disparities in healthcare amongst women of different races. The Lehigh Valley serves as a diverse data pool to extract meaningful information from. The demographic make-up of Bethlehem is varied, yet African Americans only account for roughly 6 percent of the population (Suburbanstats.org). The small size of the African American populations will need to be taken into account, but the information should still allow for valid data.

In the field of health care there is a pervasive notion that many blacks are presumed to be low income. It is interesting to see how blackness is associated with low income and class. For example, questions regarding where black patients reside and what their current occupation is can be directly linked to racial profiling in health care. The author contends black patients are more likely to receive a lower quality of health care due to one’s insurance status and income. Here, too, one can maintain that race is deeply interwoven into the construct of class and accessibility (Smedly 2012). As a result, class serves a higher purpose of being granted access to the accessibility of better medical resources and standard of care. Conversely, the construct of class not only gives and takes away in its relation to recieving appropriate resources in

Patriarchy’s Scapegoat: Black womanhood and femininity – A critique of racism, gender inequality, anti-blackness, and historical exploitation of black women.

One important health disparity is the lack of prenatal care amongst women in socially disadvantaged populations. These predominately include women of minorities, women who have a low income, and the location these women live in. This health disparity is important to address because research has shown that women who receive prenatal care are more likely to conceive babies of a healthy birth weight and have low infant mortality rates than those women who do not receive this prenatal care ("Putting Women 's Health Disparities on the Map," 2009). Therefore, health disparities amongst women in need of prenatal care have lead to preventable infant mortalities amongst women in vulnerable populations. Three reasons why this health disparity is important to address include the following: health disparities in prenatal care lead to lack of access to prenatal care to women in vulnerable populations, there are increased adverse health outcomes for both the infant and mother, and there are excess medical expenses that could otherwise have been prevented. Because “prematurity is the leading cause of newborn death in the United States” (“Healthy Mothers and Healthy babies,” 2013), finding and developing a solution will be extremely beneficial and needs to begin with addressing prenatal care.

The disparities are around us every day and unless we educate ourselves and our communities these disparities will continue to wreak havoc on our neighborhoods and in the future, we will just be putting our kids and their kids in a continuing cycle of ignorance when we could have done more if it’s just educating the community we leave in, that alone could be enough to turn the tides in our people favor. In turn, I would hope this paper enlighten you on what is going on in our neighborhood and what we can do to correct this issue to preserve our autonomy. Racial and ethnic health disparities undermine what a healthcare system should stand for. Although the top three causes and seven of the 10 leading causes of death are the same for African Americans and whites, the risk factors and incidence, morbidity, and mortality rates for these diseases and injuries often are greater among blacks than whites (MMWR, 2005). Health disparities refer to differences in disease risks, incidence, morbidity, and mortality but most of all for the sake of this paper unequal access to quality health insurance amongst African American in the United States, which will also go hand and hand with the social and economic disadvantages. The disadvantages of health disparities usually affect people of African American descent who have systemically experienced a greater social and economic obstacle to health care.

Today, one of the leading problems discussed in politics is healthcare. America constantly struggles with their healthcare system to make it affordable and accessible to communities. In the twentieth century this same problem also existed, creating one of the most well-known African American activist groups in America. In the book Body and Soul by Alondra Nelson, it discusses the social inequalities of the healthcare system in America and how the Black Panther Party fought against medical discrimination for African Americans. Nelson talks about how the Black Panther Party went from the role of protecting black citizens to a larger political role in African American health care. The significance of this book applies to medical sociology in many ways and is essential to the understanding of providing better healthcare to future generations. In the following book review, it includes a summary of each chapter to highlight the main points, some of the very many medical sociology concepts that could be applied, and lastly an evaluation of the book as a whole and its significance to our course.

Major disparities continue to exist in spite of America’s “Affordable Care Act”, Although minorities suffer disease five times greater than the rest of the nation, minorities represent the majority of the disparity. Infant Mortality has always been America’s indicator as to the state of the countries health status. America is one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world, However, America ranks number 24th in the world for infant mortality. Puerto Rican and Indian women rank highest among ethnic classes with low infant mortality rates. Some researchers have found lack of prenatal access as the key contributing factor to low mortality and birth weights among these two ethnic classes.

Pregnant mothers are viewed as a business made for doctors and hospitals as insurances typically cover infant birth and hospital bills. As Patricia Burkhardt, Clinical Associate Professor, NYU Midwifery Program could not speak the truth any better, she states, “Hospitals are a business. They want those beds filled and emptied. They don’t want women hanging around the labor room.”

Watson and Mason’s article, “Power of the first Hour” and Risworth, et al.’s article “I was on the way to the Hospital but I Delivered in the Bush” both focus on aspects of maternal and infant care and demonstrate the fundamental differences between western policies enacted to improve women’s lives in developing countries and the local realty in those developing countries.

These strategies continue to undermine the choices that the Women of Color have in deciding whether or not they want to have children because they do not want to be stigmatized with poverty. Obviously, the adverse and psychological effects of the various interlocking forms of oppressions that limits Women of Color’s reproductive rights makes it very important to understand them.

Women and ethnic minorities have been subjected to many inequalities in the health care system. Though there are efforts to “improving” the system, some women are still under represented. These under representations are caused by inadequate ways to receiving health care and restrictions of things such as abortions. According to the chapter “Navigating the Health Care System” in the text book Our Bodies, Ourselves; the author states, “Unfortunately, health care reform includes burdensome restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion care and unacceptable limits on access to coverage for certain immigrant women” (Norsigian, p.653,

The existing healthcare system is also responsible for these discriminations. Thusly, insurance companies and hospitals are also responsible for this disparity for instance: certain forms of treatment are encouraged and the others are discouraged. This paper focuses only on physicians in order to highlight their unique role in enacting inequality in the care of reproduction, because doctors influence both the individual level of care provided to patients as well as the societal debates regarding the role of medicine in reproductive care. I want to use Michel Foucault’s theory which indicates that power transacts in the relationship of people to the knowledge elite such as teachers, doctors, therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists to back my

Black feminists have investigated how rape as a specific form of sexual violence is embedded in a system of interlocking race, gender, and class oppression (Davis 1978, 1981, 1989; Hall 1983). Reproductive rights issues such as access to information on sexuality and birth control, the struggles for abortion rights, and patterns of forced sterilization have also garnered attention

The term "reproductive rights" has become synonymous with abortion rights, birth control access, and issues surrounding reproductive technologies, yet the struggle for a woman's right to choose when and how to become pregnant often overshadows a woman's right to choose where and how to give birth. The lack of feminist discourse and activism surrounding issues of childbirth may attest to the hegemony in the modern American birth ritual of increasing medical intervention from obstetricians in hospital settings. There are currently several movements to challenge this dominant birth model--prepared childbirth advocates offer education classes and natural childbirth advocates