Pregnant While Black by
A hopeful exploration of the issues pregnant Black women face in America. Dr. Monique Rainford draws on over twenty years of experience working in obstetrics and gynecology to offer a primer on Black pregnancies and how to better care for them. She shares the successes and testimonies of Black women who have struggled during pregnancy and childbirth, anchoring the stories of these women with carefully researched facts. Despite medical advances over the last twenty years, for Black women, the overwhelming dangers of carrying and delivering children remain and it only seems to be getting worse. Rainford begins the work of "repairing the damage of the past" with an examination of the conditions that plague Black pregnancies. This important book carries the hopes and dreams of a generation looking to effect change, here and now.
Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System by
Aanalyzes how middle-class Black women navigate the complexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination-particularly in healthcare settings-is a thing of the past, and questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects poor racial minorities. Drawing from original research, the author shines a light on how women perceive the persistently negative stereotypes that follow them into the exam room.
Under the Skin by
1st edition - A landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Now in Under the Skin, Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely.
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by
It is no secret that nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical superbodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies." Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.
Patient-Centered Clinical Care for African Americans by
1st edition - A guide outlining specific differences in communication, clinical therapies, medications, protocols, and other critical approaches to the care of African Americans. It will be of significant interest to all physicians, clinicians, and allied health personnel.
All-hands-on-deck for Black maternal health
July 2023 article in Becker's Hospital Review by Advocate Health CEO Gene Woods.
Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2021
In 2021, the maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, 2.6 times the rate for non-Hispanic White women.
Black Women’s Maternal Health: A Multifaceted Approach to Addressing Persistent and Dire Health Disparities
Issue brief from the National Partnership for Women & Families
Sealy-Jefferson, S. (2022). Injustices in black maternal health: A call for different research questions, orientations, and methodologies. Frontiers in Public Health, 10, 860850.
See what's been recently published on Black maternal health on PubMed. To see more articles on PubMed click the "website" link under the last article in the list.
Advocate Health - Midwest teammates have published and presented on this topic and the library has collected this scholarly activity in our institutional repository. See the list below for a sampling of this work.
View our guide to learn more about SHARE, our institutional repository. You can also contribute your own scholarly activity by filling out this form.
