Pregnant Black mother.Photo: Getty
Babies conceived via assisted reproduction technology and born to Black mothers are more than four times as likely as their white counterparts to die as newborns, according to a new study.
Published Tuesday in the American Academy of Pediatrics’Pediatricsjournal,the results of the study, conducted “on all singleton births in the United States from 2016 to 2017,” found that “neonatal mortality was more than fourfold higher in infants of non-Hispanic Black women” compared to newborns of white women who underwent assisted reproductive technology (ART), which includesfertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.
Specifically, researchers found that while 0.3% of ART-conceived babies born to white mothers died in the first 28 days of life, 1.6% of those born to Black mothers did.
Among the group of singletons “in the spontaneous-conception group” — meaning conceived without ART — newbornsof Black women weretwice as likely to die as those of white women.
“Racial and ethnic disparities between Hispanic versus non-Hispanic White women were also significantly larger among women who conceived using [medically assisted reproduction] with regard to preterm birth (<34 weeks) and perinatal mortality,” the study also found.
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Black newborn’s feet.Getty
The study’s author also told the outlet that the results were surprising to her, as individuals who leverage the use of fertility treatments often have access to more financial resources considering the cost of the treatments, which might also lead one to believe that access would extend to high-quality prenatal and postnatal care.
But it’s possible thatthe general quality of carehas little bearing on how a mother is treated, according to Atlanta-based OB-GYN Dr. Madeline Sutton, who was not involved in the study.
“Once that pregnancy happens, the women are in the same system that has all those things that we haven’t yet fully accounted for — the systemic biases, the racism, the differences in treatments based on what type of insurance someone might have,” Sutton told NBC News.
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As of April 2021, thematernity mortalityrate in the U.S. was the highest among developed countries, and Black women were 2.5 times more likely to die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women, according to theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC).
Despite research that has found that 60% of all maternal deaths are preventable, a total of 658 women died of maternal causes in 2018.
The study, published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the race of the doctor did not have an effect on the mortality rate for white babies.
“Strikingly,” the researchers wrote, the largest decrease in mortality rate was in complex births — Black babies born in “more complicated cases” were far more likely to survive with a Black doctor. The mortality rate also significantly decreased at hospitals that deliver more Black newborns.
source: people.com
