My great-grandfather was emotionally distraught, losing the love of his life and consequently unable to care for his four young children. Eerily, maternity death rates for Black women are similar today. Dying while giving birth was an all-too-common occurrence in 1932, especially for Black women. Presumably, eliminating their role in the Black community had a direct impact on the health of Black communities. In fact, Black mid-wives also helped to catch the babies of white families and were able to travel across plantations, even during slavery. By requiring Southern Black midwives, who caught babies for nearly three hundred years in what became the United States, to conform to such new regulations without consideration of the integral roles they played within Black communities as healers, doctors, nurses, and midwives, this act contributed to the decrease of Black midwives and increase of medical doctors. While the act did attempt to improve the conditions and care for mothers, it also subjected midwives to regulations that were often inextricably tied to literacy and medical training, which Southern Black midwives often didn't have. Prior to this act, Black midwives were the first stop for childbirth, as the reputation of medical doctors for childbirth was generally low. Arguably, this act of legislation also served as a catalyst toward marginalizing the role of Southern Black mid-wives and elevating the role of medical doctors in obstetrics and gynecology. My grandmother was born thirteen years after the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, which provided maternity and child-care funding. I have several family members who I have learned are not biological family. Thus, many Black families informally adopted children, often children to whom they weren't even related. In a Southern city like the one in which my grandmother was born, there were even more limited resources for Black people. Too often, American Blacks experienced "separate but equal" public resources that were too often separate yet unequal. ![]() This was also a time in the American South when there weren't many public resources, such as orphanages, available for Black Americans to care for children. My great grandmother knew this threat was very real. This was a time when maternal mortality was very common. Her mother, my paternal great-grandmother, made a life-long promise with her husband's sister to take care of one another's children if one of them died. Grandma was born moments before her mother took her last breath.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |