Individuals have little power to effect poverty, access to medical care, experts say
YOUNGSTOWN
Systems and institutions affect people’s lives more than individual choices, especially as it applies to infant mortality, was a major takeaway from the Youngstown Minority Health Month Conference.
The conference, “Why are Our Babies Dying,” sponsored by the Youngstown Office of Minority Health, was Thursday at Tabernacle Baptist Church on Arlington Avenue.
Main speakers were legal analysts Attys. Charles W. Noble II and Kwame O. Christian, both affiliated with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.
To improve the infant-mortality rate, the percentage of babies who don’t live until their first birthdays, it is necessary to change the socioeconomic systems that originally created segregation and led to areas with poor educational opportunities and high crime rates. Those are the areas that also produce high infant-mortality rates, they said.
Noble said the high infant-mortality rates in Mahoning County and Ohio are not the result of individual failures.
“A kid who is 13 or 14 or a mother who is 18 or 19 can only do so much individually about their situations,” Noble said.
Instead, he said, the “systems are the culprits.”
Improving practical things, such as access to food and transportation, safe neighborhoods and stabilizing families and neighborhoods, are relatively low-cost solutions to high infant-mortality rates when compared with the medical and other costs associated with those rates, Noble said.
In break-out sessions, some issues identified as having a negative impact on the black community and adding to the high infant-mortality rate were distrust of the medical community and law enforcement, lack of access to resources, negative portrayal of blacks by the media, poverty, violence, lack of jobs, inadequate housing and a policy called “red-lining,” in which banks won’t provide financing for housing for blacks, leaving blacks to live in areas where “no one else wanted to live,” said one woman.
As of 2012, Ohio had the worst infant-mortality rate in the United States for black babies. Nationally, the overall mortality rate for all babies that die in the first 12 months of their lives is 6.05 per 1,000 births, compared with 7.7 per 1,000 births overall in Ohio, which ranked the state 47 out of 50 in that category.
Mahoning County is making some progress in raising awareness about high infant-mortality rates and their causes, the largest of which is premature births, said Dr. Elena Rossi from Akron Children’s Hospital.
“We have several initiatives underway, but it takes a long time to reverse the trend. We have a lot of work to do,” she said.
Among the initiatives are educating mothers and the medical community about administering the hormone progesterone, which can help reduce early delivery, to pregnant women who have a history of premature births, and inadequate birth spacing.
Ideally, there should be at least 18 months between giving birth and getting pregnant again. The majority of premature births can be prevented, Dr. Rossi said.
“Our ultimate goal is that all babies get to celebrate their first birthdays,” said Erin Bishop, Youngstown health commissioner.