A recent report looking at maternal health from 1999 to 2019 from the Journal of the American Medical Association shows the maternal mortality rate for Black women in New Jersey has been one of the worst in the country and the state, despite the state’s high rankings for income, education and health care. The rate of New Jersey Black women dying while pregnant, during delivery or one year after giving birth, doubled from the late 1990s to the 2010s and outpaced the rates all other races.
Black women are more likely to experience hypertension and hemorrhage, in a health care system where equity remains a challenge, the study pointed out. Black women also led the numbers with the most death.
“The fact is that the trend across the entire nation has increased,” said Dr. Antonio Oladipo, an OB/GYN at Hackensack University Medical Center. “We are the only country where we continue to have worse outcomes and we still put a lot of money towards our care.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Health announced $3.5 million in grant funding as part of the Healthy Women, Healthy Families initiative in an effort to improve health outcomes among Black and Hispanic infants and mothers in New Jersey.
