Prematurity is the largest cause of infant mortality. A recent March of Dimes report card issued Louisiana a failing pre-term birth grade.

“Infant mortality rates are an indication of overall health. Leading causes of infant death include birth defects, prematurity, low birth weight, maternal complications and sudden infant death syndrome,” the report states.

Black women account for the largest number of pre-term births at 55% higher than the rate among all other women.

“It’s what happened to my son,” Novod said. “He was born prematurely, and he died. When I went through the journey, I just thought, ‘gosh, I must be the unluckiest person in the world.’ You know, like, what did I do to cause this? And the more I started to learn and grow in my advocacy, I realized that it was not my fault and it was happening every day, multiple times a day across my community. And this story was repeating itself.”

Novod points to research that proves Black women have worse outcomes than white women, regardless of varying backgrounds.

“It doesn’t matter our level of education. It doesn’t matter our socioeconomic status. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “If we have healthcare or Medicaid, it just doesn’t matter. And so that to me was really sort of soul-crushing. The fact that we have this high prematurity birth rate, we’ve had it for years, it’s impacting historically marginalized families and everybody is just moving on and acting like it’s normal. There is nothing normal about prematurity. There is nothing normal about the NICU. There is certainly nothing normal about burying your baby. That experience broke me and I know that it’s doing it to women in my community every single day. And I’m not okay with that.”

Novod points to systemic racism as a starting point for issues she’s seen with infant mortality.

“Black women are 55% more likely to give birth prematurely because of systemic racism,” she said. “We have to name that. We have to talk about all the reasons why that is inadequate: prenatal care doctors, not listening to Black women and Black women and Black babies bearing the brunt of that. We have to talk about environmental injustice. We understand that disparities and birth outcomes continue to exist because of systemic racism and implicit and explicit bias, so we are victims of that. When you realize that racism could be the reason why your baby died, it does something to you. You are never the same and you hopefully get angry.”

She calls it righteous anger.

“Do I feel that our birth outcome would have been different if I had been listened to? Absolutely,” Novod said. “And so that’s why we talk to women in our local community about recognizing the signs of pre-term labor and knowing that when you have to trust your instincts when something doesn’t feel right, you need to go and get it checked out. We have to be our best advocates and we have to be our baby’s best advocates.”

Infant loss

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