CDC Responds to Professors’ Call for Permanent Assessment of Racial Discrimination in Pregnancy Survey

NEPTHC is happy to share this article about faculty impact from BUSPH’s Department of Community Health Sciences, the home of NEPHTC. The article describes the CDC’s response to a commentary co-authored by Joanna Almeida, Associate Professor of Social Work at Simmons University, and our colleague Candice Belanoff, Clinical Associate Professor of CHS. The commentary, published last spring in Maternal and Child Health Journal (MCH), called for the CDC to nationally include surveillance of racial discrimination through the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS). This initiative would provide data to measure and assess the effect of racial discrimination on maternal and child health. Belanoff says of the call to action: “Having a racism measure on the PRAMS data would allow us to dig into the reasons behind the variation in preterm birth we observed among Black birthing parents in MA in a recent study we conducted. Adjusting for the usual suspected confounders—such as maternal morbidities and indicators of socioeconomic position—didn’t make a ton of difference in the end. It would be amazing to know more about the individual experiences of people who are racialized in America.”