Before she became a Wake County commissioner, Shinica Thomas was a 23-year-old military wife, pregnant with her first child.
“My son, Eli, was breeched,” she said. “I ended up having a C-section, and for a week after that, I was constantly vomiting and dry heaving. My blood pressure skyrocketed, and we ended up having to send our baby home with my husband, Raymond.”
When her blood pressure finally came down, she was sent home with questions left unanswered.
“What I had hoped to be a joyous experience of growing our family turned into a really frightening one,” Thomas said. “My story, though one of fear, is also one of fortune. Many Black women’s experience ends in fatality.”
The auditorium at the Black Maternal and Infant Health Conference was silent as Thomas shared the story of her cousin, Shannon Spaulding, whose first child, Cairo, was born premature. He died while in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
“After the birth, my cousin was complaining of some serious chest pains and some upper abdominal discomfort, and the doctors ignored her pain,” Thomas said. “She was sent home. A week after Cairo died, my cousin, who had been sent home, suffered a heart attack and passed away as well.”
The annual conference was held Thursday at the McKimmons Conference and Training Center at NC State University. Black Pearls Society, a private think tank that works to address inequities Black women face, was one of the organizers.
“This is like the canary in the mine,” said Deena Hayes-Greene, cofounder of the Black Pearls Society. “The ability to be able to reach your first birthday, it tells us something about the overall climate for the well-being of Black people. Period. Are babies dying and mothers dying again, fully resourced or not? Something about the environment that we’re living in that says, ‘Why is being Black bad for your health?’”
The North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force report released earlier this year showed that Black babies are dying at a rate three times higher than white babies. North Carolina ranks 10th highest in infant mortality rates nationwide.
People need to share their personal stories to raise awareness about the issue and advocate at local, state and national levels to increase funding to address this crisis, even as funds for diverse health studies are being cut, said Sen. Natalie Murdock, who represents Durham and Chatham counties.
“How can we connect all of those dots when it comes to changing systems and changing systems in a space where we can’t study it in the way that we need to even identify what the problems are?” Murdock said. “Our data sets are not going to be the best over the next two years, so we’re going to have to continue to recalibrate our systems as a result of, honestly, the data gap and desert that we’re going to have over the next two years just because of a lack of federal funding and support.”
Several speakers specifically mentioned a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor who saw her $2.4 million National Institutes of Health-funded study of birth outcomes in Black families cut by the federal government.
Tina Braimah, founder and executive director of Aya Birth & Community Wellness, said North Carolina needs more doulas and midwifery programs.
“How do we pull more of those people into the system so that our moms and our parents are getting care through the whole (postpartum) six-week period?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to deliver a baby and not go back to your doctor for six weeks.”
The doctors, doulas, midwives, public health officials and others in the audience, majority women, weren’t surprised by the stories and many had their own share.
“The stats are clear,” Thomas said. “Black women and infants are dying at an alarming rate in Wake County.”
Black babies are four times more likely to die before they turn 1 year old compared to infants in other racial groups, she said.
“In one of the most prosperous counties in the state, the third-fastest growing county in the country, Black babies are still dying at higher rates,” Thomas said. “That’s unacceptable, but, unfortunately, it’s not shocking.”
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