Black Newborn Lives Matter
Black babies are three times more likely to die when treated by a white doctor than a Black one.
I recently learned a new phrase: “racial concordance.”
It means there is a match between the race or ethnicity of the person serving and the person being served.
So if you go to the doctor for treatment and you are Black, your physician is Black as well. Racial concordance.
For Black babies racial concordance is not merely about diversity or representation, it’s about life or death.
A study conducted by researchers at George Mason University revealed that Black newborns are more likely to survive birth if the doctor caring for them is Black.
Black newborns are three times more likely to die of the doctor caring for them is white.
White babies, by contrast, survive at similar rates no matter whether their doctor is white or Black.
According to one of the researchers:
"Our study provides the first evidence that the Black-White newborn mortality gap is smaller when Black MDs provide care for Black newborns than when White MDs do, lending support to research examining the importance of racial concordance in addressing health care inequities," co-author Rachel Hardeman said.
Overall, Black babies are still more than twice as likely to die in infancy than white babies. These findings indicate that Black doctors can play a vital role in increasing the survival of Black newborns.
Anyone who calls themselves “pro-life” should be concerned about the racial disparities in infant mortality between Black and white babies. Beyond that, this research points to a remedy—more Black doctors.
If we are concerned about life from womb to tomb then we will support efforts to train and hire more Black doctors not merely as a diversity initiative but as a life initiative.
One concrete way to ensure more Black doctors deliver more Black babies is to support HBCUs.
Only 5 percent of practicing physicians are Black. Over the past 10 years, four HBCU medical schools have produced more Black doctors than the top 10 predominantly white medical schools combined.
We know that Black patients tend to have better outcomes, in almost every medical discipline, when their care is shepherded by a Black doctor.” Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president of the Morehouse School of Medicine
Black newborn lives matter, but the current racial disparities in infant mortality do not reflect this. More Black doctors means more healthy Black babies.