For Brianna Jones, a young black mother living in San Francisco, rich birth project was a godsend.
It is designed to counter “.obstetric racism” Researchers claim a disproportionate number of African Americans die in childbirth, but the project will provide 150 pregnant Black and Pacific Islander San Franciscans with $1,000 per month. provided a stipend.
The money helped Jones, 20, pay for gas to drive to the antenatal clinic, buy fresh fruit and vegetables for her young son and herself, and prepare for the birth of her second child last year. I was able to maintain my health.
However, the future of the Prosperous Childbirth Project is uncertain. lawsuit They say the program, the first of its kind in the country, illegally discriminates by only giving benefits to people of a certain race.The lawsuit also targets San Francisco’s guaranteed income program. serve the artist, transgender people and black youth.
The lawsuit is part of a growing national effort by conservative groups to eliminate racial preferences in various institutions in the wake of high-profile incidents. US Supreme Court decision It ruled that race-based admissions to universities is unconstitutional.
(Brittany Sterling)
In the medical field, efforts to provide scholarships to minority medical students and other efforts to create a more national physician workforce are being threatened by legal action.
The lawsuit also jeopardizes other measures designed to reduce well-documented racial disparities.Black people are 3 to 4 times more likely to Probability is high In the United States, black infants are more likely to die from childbirth and related complications than white infants, and black infants are twice as likely as white infants to be born prematurely and die before their first birthday. Racial and ethnic minorities also Probability is high According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people die from diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and heart disease than white people.
A handful of activist nonprofits and law firms are leading the way. do no harma nonprofit organization founded in 2022 filed the lawsuit. health committee, Pharmaceutical company and public health magazine This is to prevent the selection of applicants based on race. Do No Harm has more than 6,000 members worldwide and is affiliated with non-profit legal organizations. Pacific Law Foundationattracted national attention when it defended California’s same-sex marriage ban.
Another non-profit organization Californians Equal Rights FoundationIn collaboration with a Dallas-based law firm called American Civil Rights Projectfiled a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco and the State of California over the Abundant Birth Project, alleging that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by giving funding only to Black and Pacific Islander women. Ta. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was passed, giving rights to formerly enslaved black people.
The lawsuit says the public funds used for this project and three other guaranteed income programs are “discriminatory giveaways” that are “illegal, wasteful and harmful.”
“The City and County of San Francisco designed the Enriched Birth Project with the express intent of selecting beneficiaries based on race,” Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said in a phone interview. Told. “It’s unconstitutional. They can’t do it legally, and we’re optimistic that the courts won’t allow them to continue doing it.”
San Francisco city and state officials declined to discuss the matter, citing pending litigation, but the city defended the program in its initial response to the lawsuit. According to the response, the Prosperous Childbirth Project will begin in June 2021, and the second round of subsidies will be distributed to expectant mothers this fall.
This project aims to improve maternal and child health outcomes by reducing economic stress on pregnant Black and Pacific Islander San Franciscans. People belonging to these groups face problems such as: worst result In the United States, more people die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth than in other high-income countries.California last year awarded $5 million Expand the program to include black mothers in four other counties.
but kiara bridges, A Berkeley law professor and anthropologist who has spoken to the beneficiaries of the Enriched Birth Project but is not directly involved, says the Supreme Court’s ruling on college affirmative action actually He said this could support the argument that the program is legal.
The court struck down affirmative action in part because of the majority’s opinion that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina had failed to demonstrate measurable results that justified race-consciousness in college admissions. Although statistics on the potential benefits from the “Prosperous Childbirth Project” have not been made public, Bridges and others familiar with the program say researchers have found that families who received the scholarships and families who did not receive the scholarships. The hope is that by comparing the health status of people across the country, the program will demonstrate that it saves and improves lives. The results could justify using race to select program participants, Bridges said.
Bridges also added another distinction between the role of race in college admissions and the role of race in health disparities.
“If you don’t get into Harvard, there’s always Princeton or Columbia or Cornell,” she said. “The mother’s death, the risk is a little higher.”
In California, voter-initiated Proposition 209 has banned race-based selection in public education and employment since 1996.california state congressman Mia BontaDemocrats have co-authored pending invoice This would amend a proposal to allow local governments to give benefits to certain vulnerable people if they use research-based measures that can reduce health and other disparities.
Bonta, a law school graduate, told KFF Health News that the lawsuit against the Enriching Birth Project is “the result of conservative groups wanting to exist in a world that doesn’t exist, where communities of color don’t have to suffer for generations. ” he said. The harms that result from structural racism. ”
Bonta himself has been a victim of medical racism more than once.
When she went to the hospital with a serious back injury, she was questioned by a doctor, who seemed to believe she was faking the pain to get medicine.
“But as a Black Latina woman, I wouldn’t have received the care I needed if it weren’t for the intervention of my husband, who happened to be there and went into health advocacy mode,” she said. Bonta’s husband, Rob Bonta, is also an attorney and currently serves as California’s attorney general.
Brianna Jones experiences racism every day, she said.
She gave birth to her first child at age 15 in a San Francisco hospital. In her fear and severe pain, she did what her mother in childbirth always did and screamed.
The nurse ordered her to “shut up.”
(Brianna Jones)
In the United States, black women are much more likely than white women to report being reprimanded, threatened, or yelled at by a health care provider during childbirth. research result.they are also facing other formats of obstetric racismbarriers to quality care and accumulated stress from lifelong discrimination.
growing up black Mainly Caucasians and Asians San Francisco was a difficult place for Jones. But when she gave birth to her second child last year, she learned about the Enriching Birthing Project from her mother, and within a month, she learned about her race and the Bayview-Hunters Point (some of the city’s poorest residents) Based on her address (where she lives), she almost qualified as one of the following children. 150 women will receive $1,000 per month during pregnancy and six months postpartum.
“I really felt like God helped me,” she said.
But for Morenov, he says this is just a form of discrimination, and the city must either open its enriching maternity projects to all pregnant people or close them down. “The whole point of the 14th Amendment is to require America to treat all Americans as Americans with the same equal rights,” he said.
During both pregnancies, Jones suffered from high blood pressure, which caused swelling in her ankles and dizziness. In her latest work, she quit couchsurfing and moved into an apartment thanks to a grant from her childbirth project, where she gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Adonis.
“People of color are known to have a much harder time than other races,” Jones said. “Where I live, people are just struggling to make ends meet.”
“It’s wrong for them to try to take this program away from us,” she said.This article was created by KFF Health Newsformerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of our core operating programs on health issues. KFF — An independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. KFF Health News is california healthlinean editorially independent service. california healthcare foundation.
