Crisis In The Crib: Saving Our Nation's Babies
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Crisis in the Crib with Tonya Lewis Lee Women's eNews Black Maternal Health Series: Year 2
On Wednesday January 20th, Women's eNews and Tonya Lewis Lee will celebrate the second year of the Black Maternal Health project and welcome new Black Maternal Health Advisory Committee Chair Carol Jenkins, with a screening of Crisis in the Crib and a discussion about the maternal health of African American women.
Crisis in the Crib: Saving Our Nation's Babies, a documentary by Tonya Lewis Lee focuses on infant mortality in the African American community. It was developed as part of the U.S. Office of Minority Health A Healthy Baby Begins with You campaign.
Maternal and infant mortality for the African-American community is a pressing, but often overlooked, public health concern. The rate of death for African American babies before their first birthday is twice the rate of white babies and greatly outpaces the national average. For some communities these deaths can seem like a normal part of life and in fact are strong indicators of the overall health of the community. The Women's eNews multimedia project: Black Maternal Health: A Legacy and a Future, directed by editor Kimberly Seals Allers, was developed to raise awareness on the fact that African American women confront striking statistics as they form partnerships, become parents and care for their children.African American women represent nearly half of maternal mortalities even though they form only 12 percent of the
African American women are 3 to 6 times more likely to die during pregnancy and the six weeks after delivery than
African American women are also least likely to breastfeed a child exclusively for six months. Only 20 percent were following government recommendations and exclusively nursing when their infants, compared to the 40 percent of white women who did so.
Women's eNews' multimedia project includes news stories, commentaries and videos, produced by Women's eNews with the exception of a video produced by a group of
Kimberly Seals Allers is the founder of MochaManual.com, a popular online magazine and lifestyle destination for Black mothers. She also is the author of the Mocha Manual guidebook series, including the Mocha Manual for a Fabulous Pregnancy. Seals-Allers is a prize-winning journalist, a NAACP Image Award nominee, and former senior editor at Essence. About Women's eNews: Women's eNews is a prize-winning nonprofit news service supported by its readers and other donors. Launched in 2000, the independent media outlet provides news coverage unavailable anywhere else of substantive issues of particular concern to women and women's views on public policy. Rita Henley Jensen is founder and editor in chief.
For more information on this event, permissions to reprint from the series or licensing arrangements, please contact Charlotte Cooper at 212-244-1744 or e-mail her at Charlotte@womensenews.org |
