"Whether you're talking about applying for a job, or purchasing a new car, finding housing, getting education. "It's hard to find any aspect of life that's not impacted by racial discrimination," he says. What is different about growing up black in America is discrimination, says David. "So, there was something about growing up black in the United States and then bearing a child that was associated with lower birth weight," says David. David and Collins published their results in 2002 in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Meanwhile, the grandchildren of white European immigrant women were bigger than their mothers when they were born. This was also true of the grandchildren of black women who had emigrated from the Caribbean. In other words, the grandchildren were more likely to be premature, like African-American babies. The grandchildren of African immigrant women were born smaller than their mothers had been at birth. Then, many years later, David and Collins noticed something startling. So, it clearly isn't genetics, says David.
#Just born newborn black baby girl full#
But as they reported in their 1997 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, those babies were more like white babies - they were bigger and more likely to be full term. So, David and his colleague, Collins, looked at the babies of immigrant women from West Africa. But if genes are at play, then women from Africa would also have the same risks. Some people suggested that the root cause may be genetics. "That's exactly the kind of case that makes us ask the question: What else is there?" says David. In fact, today, a college-educated black woman like Samantha Pierce is more likely to give birth prematurely than a white woman with a high school degree. "They both have something like a 13 percent chance of having a low birth weight baby," he says.īut in higher-income neighborhoods where women are likely to be slightly older and more educated, "among white women, the risk of low birth weight drops dramatically to about half of that, whereas for African-American women, it only drops a little bit." "We knew that fewer of them had completed their education by the time they were bearing children."īut David, who at the time was at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and his colleague James Collins at Northwestern University Medical School found that even educated, middle-class African-American women were at a higher risk of having smaller, premature babies with a lower chance of survival.įor example, David says, black and white teenage mothers growing up in poor neighborhoods both have a higher risk of having smaller, premature babies. "We knew African-American women were more likely to be poor," says David. I could also see them stop breathing, you know." "They lived for about five minutes, each of them," she says. After a week in the hospital, still leaking, her water broke and she gave birth to her sons. She was getting regular checkups and taking her prenatal vitamins.Įverything went smoothly until one day in her second trimester she discovered she was leaking fluid. She had a college degree, which is known to improve women's chances of having a healthy pregnancy. She already had one son from a previous marriage, and that pregnancy was healthy and normal. Pierce thought she was a poster child for a good pregnancy.
"I went to get my birth control taken out and showed up two weeks later, like 'Hey, We're pregnant!' " she says, laughing. It felt like a good time to get pregnant.
The organization was growing, and Pierce had been promoted to management. She worked for a nonprofit that fought against predatory lending. "I was a kick-ass community organizer," says Pierce, who is African-American and lives in Cleveland. She and her husband had recently gotten married. It was a time when things were going really well in her life. In February 2009, Samantha Pierce became pregnant with twins. Scientists say black women lead more stressful lives, which makes them more likely to give birth prematurely and puts their babies at risk of dying.Įditor's note: This story contains language that may be offensive. In 2009, Pierce gave premature birth to twins. Samantha Pierce of Cleveland has a 7-year-old daughter, Camryn.
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