TCNJ

25 SPRING 2024 What struck Salgado-Cowan the most during the 16-hour program was how the skills she and her classmates practiced could help reverse centuries of medical racism and disproportionately bad birthing outcomes for families of color, particularly in New Jersey. "We looked at everything through a lens of social justice," she says. For example, there's a prominent implicit bias among medical professionals today that Black women have a higher pain tolerance than white women, leading to the systematic undertreatment of pain among Black women. When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, Black women, no matter their educational background or social class, are most at risk for complications and death. Salgado-Cowan says she now understands the bigger implications of her role as a doula. "I am there to comfort the person who will give birth physically and emotionally and to be a source of knowledge for them," she says. "This is about giving a woman the support and resources she needs to make her own informed decisions about her life, her body, and the birth of her child. It's about empowerment." " When we move from the statistics to the human experience, time after time and story after story, we hear, 'I do not feel heard.'" — Natasha Patterson, professor of public health T he impetus behind the creation of the course, Foundations in Community Birthwork: The Doula Method, is the sobering statistics about maternal mortality across the country and in New Jersey in particular. Maternal mortality is the death of a woman during pregnancy, at delivery, or soon after delivery, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which most recently said the national rate was a whopping 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births in 2021. What's more is that Black women were nearly three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy complications. In New Jersey, which ranks 27th for maternal deaths, the outlook is worse: A Black woman is seven times more likely to die from maternity-related complications than a white woman, and a Black baby is almost three times more likely than a white infant to die Ria Rodney '08 saw a need in the community and recognized TCNJ students could make an impact. before their first birthday. Many of these birth-related deaths can be prevented with proper care, numerous reports have found. "When we move from the statistics to the human experience, time after time and story after story, we hear, 'I do not feel heard. I said I was in pain and nobody did anything,'" says Natasha Patterson, a public health professor who helped develop the doula certification course. Patterson's research over nearly 20 years has focused on racial and ethnic health disparities, so when New Jersey's First Lady Tammy Murphy invited her to attend a yearly Black maternal health leadership summit for the first time in 2018, a pathway for the course opened. Out of the summit came the Nurture NJ Strategic Plan in 2021, the state's official blueprint to decrease maternal mortality by 50% over five years and make the state

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