The study, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, includes nearly all the infants born to first-time mothers from 2007 to 2016 in California, the state with the most annual births.
“This is a landmark paper, and what it makes really stark is how we are leaving one group of people way behind,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a University of Pennsylvania economist who studies racial health disparities and was not involved in the research. But this study is novel because it’s the first of its size to show how the risks of childbirth vary by both race and parental income, and how Black families, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are disproportionately affected.
Research has repeatedly shown that Black mothers and babies have the worst childbirth outcomes in the United States. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies. In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth - except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births.
