Starting next year, 150 Black South Pacific women will receive the supplement for the duration of their pregnancy and the first six months of their baby’s life. The new initiative, called the Abundant Birth Project, has the goal of eventually providing the supplement to women for up to two years after pregnancy.
“We’re really trying to reduce stress at a critical moment in a mom’s life and a child’s life,” said Dr. Zea Malawa, a board-certified pediatrician who leads San Francisco’s Expecting Justice initiative and who shepherded the project through two years of development. “Because we know that if we intervene in that window, the potential benefits can last a lifetime for that child.”
In San Francisco, Black infants are almost twice as likely as white infants to be born prematurely, and Pacific Islander infants have the city’s second-highest preterm birth rate. Black families also account for half of the city’s maternal deaths and over 15% of infant deaths, according to the office of San Francisco Mayor London Breed.
Nationwide, Black women die during pregnancy or in the months after giving birth two-and-a-half times more often than white women and three times more often than Hispanic women, according to data released in January by the National Center for Health Statistics. This is often because Black and Pacific Islander women lack access to quality health care, experience income inequality issues and are victims of systemic racism, experts say.
The monthly supplements, which will be paid for through private donations and some public funding, will come without any restrictions on how the women spend the money, a condition meant to empower the women, according to Malawa.
