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Despite decades of investment and improvements in infant health in the United States, efforts to ensure the health and well-being of birthing people, especially those from racialized and minoritized communities, have been underfunded and neglected. As a result, many birthing people do not have access to the quality care they deserve and suffer disproportionately from adverse health outcomes such as severe maternal morbidity and maternal mortality. Through a Reproductive Justice lens, this paper will discuss structural causes for maternal health disparities as well as some of the structural solutions necessary to support the correction of centuries of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, and other minoritized identities., Competing Interests: Disclosures We certify that, to the best of our knowledge, no aspect of our current personal or professional circumstance places us in the position of having a conflict of interest with this chapter., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A shift in focus towards healthy reproductive outcomes may reveal opportunities for novel interventions and strategies to promote optimal health. Using variables from the National Center for Health Statistics restricted use natality files, we calculated Empirical Bayes smoothed (EBS) rates of optimal birth for the all live births-both overall and by maternal race/ethnicity-by applying the smoothing tool in GeoDa version 1.18.0.10 We defined counties achieving greater racial birth equity as those where the overall EBS optimal birth rate was greater than the national 75th percentile and the absolute difference between maternal racial/ethnic categories was smaller than the national 25th percentile difference. During the study period, 49.80% of overall births could be classified as an optimal birth according to the study definition. Of the 3140 US counties, only 282 (8.98%) appeared to advance White-Black equity in optimal births, and 205 (6.53%) appeared to advance White-Hispanic equity in optimal births. In the effort improve maternal health, we should focus not only on the absence of negative outcomes, but also the occurrence of positive outcomes. Our analytic results suggest that optimal births can be measured and that geographic inequities by race occur., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Infant mental health is interconnected with and affected by maternal mental health. A mother or birthing person's mental health before and during pregnancy and the postpartum period is essential for a child's development. During the first year of life, infants require emotional attachment and bonding to strive. Perinatal mood disorders are likely to hinder attachment and are associated with an increased risk of adverse mental health effects for children later in life. The Black community is faced with a crisis as Black mothers experience a higher prevalence of perinatal mood disorders, including postpartum depression and anxiety, compared to the United States national estimates. The aim of the research is to identify social, structural, and economic disparities of Black perinatal women and birthing people's experience to understand the impact of perinatal mental health on infants' mental health. Black mothers and birthing people may often face social and structural barriers that limit their opportunity to seek and engage with interventions and treatment that address the root causes of their perinatal mood disorder. To enhance understanding of racial disparities caused by social and structural determinants of health on Black mothers and birthing people's mental health and health care experiences that influence infant mental health, the study team conducted semi-structured interviews among self-identified cisgender Black women health professionals nationwide, who provide care to pregnant or postpartum Black women and birthing people. Our study attempted to identify themes, pathways, interventions, and strategies to promote equitable and anti-racist maternal and infant mental health care. Using a Rigorous and Accelerated Data Reduction (Radar) technique and a deductive qualitative analytic approach it was found that limited access to resources, lack of universal screening and mental health education, and the disjointed healthcare system serves as barriers, contribute to mental health issues, and put Black mothers and birthing people at a disadvantage in autonomous decision making. Our study concluded that instituting education on healthy and culturally appropriate ways to support infant development in parent education programs may support Black parents in establishing healthy attachment and bonds. Prioritizing strategies to improve maternal mental health and centering Black parents in developing these educational parenting programs may optimize parenting experiences., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Estriplet, Morgan, Davis, Crear Perry and Matthews.)

Purpose: The purpose of this report from the field is to describe the process by which an multidisciplinary workgroup, selected by the CDC Foundation in partnership with maternal health experts, developed a definition of racism that would be specifically appropriate for inclusion on the Maternal Mortality Review Information Application (MMRIA) form., Description: In the United States Black women are nearly 4 times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death. Recent evidence points to racism as a fundamental cause of this inequity. Furthermore, the CDC reports that 3 of 5 pregnancy related deaths are preventable. With these startling facts in mind, the CDC created the Maternal Mortality Review Information Application (MMRIA) for use by Maternal Mortality Review Committees (MMRC) to support standardized data abstraction, case narrative development, documentation of committee decisions, and analysis on maternal mortality to inform practices and policies for preventing maternal mortality., Assessment: Charged with the task of defining racism and discrimination as contributors to pregnancy related mortality, the work group established four goals to define their efforts: (1) the desire to create a product that was inclusive of all forms of racism and discrimination experienced by birthing people; (2) an acknowledgement of the legacy of racism in the U.S. and the norms in health care delivery that perpetuate racist ideology; (3) an acknowledgement of the racist narratives surrounding the issue of maternal mortality and morbidity that often leads to victim blaming; and (4) that the product would be user friendly for MMRCs., Conclusion: The working group developed three definitions and a list of recommendations for action to help MMRC members provide suggested interventions to adopt when discrimination or racism were contributing factors to a maternal death. The specification of these definitions will allow the systematic tracking of the contribution of racism to maternal mortality through the MMRIA and allow a greater standardization of its identification across participating jurisdictions with MMRCs that use the form., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Objectives: Social and contextual factors underlying the continually disproportionate and burdensome risk of adverse health outcomes experienced by Black women in the US are underexplored in the literature. The aim of this study was to use an index based on area-level population distributions of race and income to predict risk of death during pregnancy and up to 1 year postpartum among women in Louisiana., Methods: Using vital records data provided by the Louisiana Department of Health 2016-2017 (n = 125,537), a modified Poisson model was fit with generalized estimating equations to examine the risk of pregnancy-associated death associated with census tract-level values of the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE)-grouped by tertile-while adjusting for both individual and tract-level confounders., Results: Analyses resulted in an estimated 1.73 (95% CI 1.02-2.93) times increased risk for pregnancy-associated death for those in areas which were characterized by concentrated deprivation (high proportions of Black and low-income residents) relative to those in areas of concentrated privilege (high proportions of white and high-income residents), independent of other factors., Conclusions for Practice: In addition to continuing to consider the deeply entrenched racism and economic inequality that shape the experience of pregnancy-associated death, we must also consider their synergistic effect on access to resources, maternal population health, and health inequities., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Infant outcomes after maternal severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection are not well described. In a prospective US registry of 263 infants, maternal SARS-CoV-2 status was not associated with birth weight, difficulty breathing, apnea, or upper or lower respiratory infection through 8 weeks of age., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.)

Background: Many pregnant people find no bridge to ongoing specialty or primary care after giving birth, even when clinical and social complications of pregnancy signal need. Black, indigenous, and all other women of color are especially harmed by fragmented care and access disparities, coupled with impacts of racism over the life course and in health care., Methods: We launched the initiative "Bridging the Chasm between Pregnancy and Health across the Life Course" in 2018, bringing together patients, advocates, providers, researchers, policymakers, and systems innovators to create a National Agenda for Research and Action. We held a 2-day conference that blended storytelling, evidence analysis, and consensus building to identify key themes related to gaps in care and root causes of inequities. In 2019, more than 70 stakeholders joined six working groups to reach consensus on strategic priorities based on equity, innovation, effectiveness, and feasibility., Findings: Working groups identified six key strategic areas for bridging the chasm. These include: 1) progress toward eliminating institutional and interpersonal racism and bias as a requirement for accreditation of health care institutions, 2) infrastructure support for community-based organizations, 3) extension of holistic team-based care to the postpartum year and beyond, with integration of doulas and community health workers on the team, 4) extension of Medicaid coverage and new quality and pay-for-performance metrics to link maternity care and primary care, 5) systems to preserve maternal narratives and data across providers, and 6) alignment of research with women's lived experiences., Conclusions: The resulting agenda presents a path forward to remedy the structural chasms in women's health care, with key roles for advocates, policymakers, researchers, health care leaders, educators, and the media., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

The use of telemedicine in U.S. perinatal care has drastically increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and will likely continue given the national focus on high-value, patient-centered care. If implemented in an equitable manner, telemedicine has the potential to reduce disparities in care access and related outcomes that stem from systemic racism, implicit biases and other forms of discrimination within our health care system. In this commentary, we address implementation factors that should be considered to ensure that disparities are not widened as telemedicine becomes more integrated into care delivery., Competing Interests: Financial Disclosure The authors did not report any potential conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to intervening in individuals' health in the "preconception" period as an approach to optimizing pregnancy outcomes. Increasing attention to the structural and social determinants of health and to the need to prioritize reproductive autonomy has underscored the need to evolve the preconception health framework to center race equity and to engage with the historical and social context in which reproduction and reproductive health care occur. In this commentary, we describe the results of a meeting with a multidisciplinary group of maternal and child health experts, reproductive health researchers and practitioners, and Reproductive Justice leaders to define a new approach for clinical and public health systems to engage with the health of nonpregnant people. We describe a novel "Reproductive and Sexual Health Equity" framework, defined as an approach to comprehensively meet people's reproductive and sexual health needs, with explicit attention to structural influences on health and health care and grounded in a desire to achieve the highest level of health for all people and address inequities in health outcomes. Principles of the framework include centering the needs of and redistributing power to communities, having clinical and public health systems acknowledge historical and ongoing harms related to reproductive and sexual health, and addressing root causes of inequities. We conclude with a call to action for a multisectoral effort centered in equity to advance reproductive and sexual health across the reproductive life course., Competing Interests: Financial Disclosure UCSF hosted the expert panel that this work summarizes. All non-UCSF authors had travel, hotel and per diem expenses covered by UCSF, and were provided with an honorarium of $1,500. Aletha Y. Akers received funds from Merck, Inc. for serving on the HPV Advisory Panel, from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals for serving on the HPV advisory group, and from Bayer Healthcare for an investigator-initiated grant. Barbara Levy disclosed receiving payments from AbbVie, Elidah Health, Dorsata, Acessa Health, Alydia Health, FLO Health, and Zebra Medical. Laura Jimenez disclosed that on occasion, her organization acts in an advisory capacity to various research entities that are under the UCSF umbrella. The other authors did not report any potential conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

Since the World Health Organization launched its commission on the social determinants of health (SDOH) over a decade ago, a large body of research has proven that social determinants-defined as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age-are significant drivers of disease risk and susceptibility within clinical care and public health systems. Unfortunately, the term has lost meaning within systems of care because of misuse and lack of context. As many disparate health outcomes remain, including higher risk of maternal mortality among Black women, a deeper understanding of the SDOH-and what forces underlie their distribution-is needed. In this article, we will expand our review of social determinants of maternal health to include the terms "structural determinants of health" and "root causes of inequities" as we assess the literature on this topic. We hypothesize that the addition of structural determinants and root causes will identify racism as a cause of inequities in maternal health outcomes, as many of the social and political structures and policies in the United States were born out of racism, classism, and gender oppression. We will conclude with proposed practice and policy solutions to end inequities in maternal health outcomes.

Growing discourse around maternity care during the pandemic offers an opportunity to reflect on how this crisis has amplified inequities in health care. We argue that policies upholding the rights of birthing people, and policies decreasing the risk of COVID-19 transmission are not mutually exclusive. The explicit lack of standardization of evidence-based maternity care, whether expressed in clinical protocols or institutional policy, has disproportionately impacted marginalized communities. If these factors remain unexamined, then it would seem that equity is not the priority, but retaining power and control is. We advocate for a comprehensive understanding of how this pandemic has revealed our deepest failures., Competing Interests: No competing financial interests exist., (© P. Mimi Niles et al., 2020; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.)

In the last decade-plus, there has been growing enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraceptive methods as the solution to unintended pregnancy in the United States. Contraceptive access efforts have primarily focused on addressing provider and policy barriers to long-acting reversible contraception and have promoted long-acting reversible contraception as first-line methods through marketing and tiered-effectiveness counseling. A next generation of contraceptive access efforts has the opportunity to move beyond this siloed focus on long-acting reversible contraception toward a focus on equity and person-centeredness. Here we define a new framework for increasing equitable access to high-quality, person-centered contraceptive care that includes programmatic elements necessary to provide information and services to address the barriers to accessing quality care, organized into a four-part continuum. The continuum is contextualized within structural, systematic, and social factors that influence experience of contraceptive care. We aim to provide a practical framework for researchers, program implementers, and policy makers to develop and evaluate efforts to improve equitable access to and quality of contraceptive care. Initiatives can intentionally be cognizant of broader structural and social factors that will influence their success and the likelihood of negative unintended consequences for marginalized groups and thus deliberately work to design programs that meet all people's contraceptive needs and support reproductive autonomy., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Enhanced understanding of spatial social polarization as a determinant of infant mortality is critical to efforts aimed at advancing health equity. Our objective was to identify associations between spatial social polarization and risk of infant death., Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of all birth records issued to non-Hispanic (NH) Black and White women in Wayne County, MI, from 2010 to 2013 (n = 84 159), including linked death records for deaths occurring at less than 1 year of age. Spatial social polarization was measured in each Census tract of maternal residence (n = 599) using the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE)-a joint measure of racial and economic segregation-estimated from American Community Survey 2009-2013 data. Log-Poisson regression models quantified relative risk (RR) of infant death (all-cause and cause-specific) associated with tertiles of the index, adjusting for maternal demographic characteristics and tract-level poverty., Results: The crude infant-mortality rate was more than 2-fold higher among NH Black infants compared with NH Whites (14.0 vs 5.9 deaths per 1000 live births). Half of the 845 infant deaths (72% NH Black, 28% NH White) occurred in tracts in the lowest tertile of the ICE distribution, representing areas of relative deprivation. After adjustments, risk of death among infants in the lowest tertile was 1.46 times greater than those in the highest tertile (adjusted infant-mortality rate = 3.7 deaths per 1000 live births in highest tertile vs 5.4 deaths per 1000 live births in lowest tertile, relative risk = 1.46, 95% confidence interval = 1.02, 2.09). Patterns of associations with the index differed by cause of death., Conclusions: These findings suggest efforts to support equitable community investments may reduce incidents of death and the disproportionate experience of loss among NH Black women., (© The Author(s) 2018; all rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association.)

In the US, the non-Hispanic Black infant mortality rate exceeds the rate among non-Hispanic Whites by more than two-fold. To explore factors underlying this persistent disparity, we employed a mixed methods approach with concurrent quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. Eighteen women participated in interviews about their experience of infant loss. Several common themes emerged across interviews, grouped by domain: individual experiences (trauma, grieving and counseling; criminalization); negative interactions with healthcare providers and the healthcare system; and broader contextual factors. Concurrently, we estimated the Black infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births) using linked live birth-infant death records from 2010 to 2013 in every metropolitan statistical area in the US. Poisson regression examined how contextual indicators of population health, socioeconomic conditions of the Black population, and features of the communities in which they live were associated with Black infant mortality and inequity in Black-White infant mortality rates across 100 metropolitan statistical areas with the highest Black infant mortality rates. We used principal components analysis to create a Birth Equity Index in order to examine the collective impact of contextual indicators on Black infant mortality and racial inequity in mortality rates. The association between the Index and Black infant mortality was stronger than any single indicator alone: in metropolitan areas with the worst social, economic, and environmental conditions, Black infant mortality rates were on average 1.24 times higher than rates in areas where conditions were better (95% CI = 1.16, 1.32). The experiences of Black women in their homes, neighborhoods, and health care centers and the contexts in which they live may individually and collectively contribute to persistent racial inequity in infant mortality., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

We examined associations between state-level measures of structural racism and infant mortality among black and white populations across the US. Overall and race-specific infant mortality rates in each state were calculated from national linked birth and infant death records from 2010 to 2013. Structural racism in each state was characterized by racial inequity (ratio of black to white population estimates) in educational attainment, median household income, employment, imprisonment, and juvenile custody. Poisson regression with robust standard errors estimated infant mortality rate ratios (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) associated with an IQR increase in indicators of structural racism overall and separately within black and white populations. Across all states, increasing racial inequity in unemployment was associated with a 5% increase in black infant mortality (RR=1.05, 95% CI=1.01, 1.10). Decreasing racial inequity in education was associated with an almost 10% reduction in the black infant mortality rate (RR=0.92, 95% CI=0.85, 0.99). None of the structural racism measures were significantly associated with infant mortality among whites. Structural racism may contribute to the persisting racial inequity in infant mortality., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)