By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Racial injustice in the United States affects Blacks from cradle, according to new research which found that Black new born babies are three times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
Black newborns are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, said researchers from George Mason University who analysed data capturing 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015.
The study, reported by CNN, shows that the mortality rate of Black newborns shrunk by between 39 per cent and 58 per cent when Black physicians took charge of the birth.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person’s life.
By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor’s race.
The study supports previous research, which has shown that, while infant mortality rates have fallen in recent decades, Black children remain significantly more likely to die early than their White counterparts.
When cared for by White physicians, Black newborns were about three times more likely to die in the hospital than White newborns, the researchers found.
“Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns,” the authors wrote.
“The findings suggest that Black physicians outperform their White colleagues when caring for Black newborns.
“Taken with this work, it gives warrant for hospitals and other care organisations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism.
“Reducing racial disparities in newborn mortality will also require raising awareness among physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities.”
It is already known that Black infants have 2.3 times the infant mortality rate as White infants, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health.
And a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which covered the period between 2000 to 2017 and was published in June, found that Black infants still have more than twice the risk of dying as White infants.
U.S. infant mortality rates decline
The age of women giving birth climbed as infant death rates declined in the U.S. between 2000 and 2017, according to National Vital Statistics Reports by the CDC.
But the welcome news was tempered by the fact that Black infants still have over twice the risk of dying as White infants, experts pointed out to CNN.
Infant mortality rates fell for all age groups, and shifts in the age of women giving birth accounted for about one-third of the decline from 2000 through 2017.
Infant death rates dropped by 16 per cent for women ages 30 to 39 and 12 per cent for women 40 and older, the report found. The rates also dropped for babies born to women under age 29, but only by 8 per cent to 9 per cent.
Still, experts warned it may be too soon to celebrate this decline in deaths.
“What should not be acceptable to us is that we still have about 22,000 infant mortalities – or infants who do not get to see their first birthday,” said Dr. Rahul Gupta, chief medical and health officer at March of Dimes in New York, who was not involved in the new report.
“For Black women, that rate is over two times, so there’s still an unacceptably high racial disparity in infant mortality.
“Infant mortality is unacceptable to begin with, but the enormous racial disparity must be addressed,” Gupta told CNN.
The report, based on birth and infant death data from the National Vital Statistics System, also found that the percentage of births increased between 2000 and 2017 for women ages 25 and older in the U.S.
The sharpest rise was in women over age 35. Overall, birth percentages among:
- Women ages 25 to 29 increased 9 per cent
- Women ages 30 to 35 increased 24 per cent
- Women ages 35 to 39 increased 30 per cent
- Women ages 40 and older increased 39 per cent
However, there was an even sharper decline in percentage of births for women below age 25. Births to women under age 20 declined by 57 per cent, and by 21 per cent for women between 20 and 24.
“One of the things that this report shows is that we made tremendous progress in curbing the trends of teenage pregnancy in this country and we’ve been declining at about 8 per cent a year,” Gupta told CNN.
“However, that progress disproportionately positively impacts non-Hispanic White women.
“And what we’re seeing is the shift that happens in aging is proportionately more likely to impact negatively Black women unfortunately. This is the importance of this data,” he added.
The report has some limitations, including that the findings are dependent on what information has been reported to the CDC and captured in the data.
“What comes in goes out. The limitation of this report is that the data could be incomplete,” Gupta said, adding that the data that is captured on race is what gets reported.
“So there may be other data that didn’t get captured.”
