September 12, 2022

17:09

Priscilla Peixoto – from Amazon Agency

MANAUS – In Brazil, black women have worse indicators of access to prenatal care, as well as higher rates of maternal mortality during pregnancy, childbirth and puerperium, is what the report “Racial inequalities in health: prenatal care and maternal mortality in Brazil, 2014-2020″, formulated by the Institute for Health Policy Studies (IEPS), points out.

The study focused on the period from 2014 to 2020 shows that, on average, there were 8 more maternal deaths of black women than white women for every 100,000 live births. “When analyzing the evolution of the percentage of adequate prenatal care, according to race/color, it was found that there are persistent differences between black and white women during the analyzed period (2014 to 2020)”, an excerpt from the document states.

Violation of life

According to Izete Santos, a researcher, social activist, and coordinator of Political Education at the National Institute of Afro-Origin, the racial differential pointed out in access to maternal health care services shows, in summary, the violation of the right to life since the pregnancy period.

“When we come across a report like this, we realize the violation of a right that concerns life. The norms of protection of the right to life, health, and dignity that the Constitution speaks so much about are being violated. A reality that puts women and, consequently, their children at risk”, says Izete, who adds:

“The health and life of the fetus depends on the health of the mother’s life, and going from the Constitution to the Child Statute, in which article 7, which also talks about the fundamental rights to life and health, we note that children and adolescents have the right to protection, to life and to health, through the implementation of public policies that allow the birth and the healthy and harmonious development in conditions worthy of existence”, says the researcher.

Data

According to the study, in the year 2014, while 76.1% of white women had an adequate number of prenatal appointments, only 59.8% of black women accessed this care. From that period until 2019, the survey found a progressive improvement, with adequate care for 81.2% of white women and 67.8% of black women. 

According to the document, by 2020, with the pandemic period, the proportion of live birth pregnancies with the number of adequate prenatal care visits falls by 0.54% for white women, while for black women it falls by 1.44%.

“In 2020, with the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, a reversal of the trend from the 2014 to 2019 period is then noted, with the gap regressing more for black women than white women”, the report highlights.

Variations of racism

The coordinator of the Afro Origin National Institute cites the nuances of racism, reflecting in the difference of treatment and care for black women who are neglected, compared to the non-black mother.

“Then, we return to the policy that the health system has, through the federal government, which is to ensure ethical, humanized, and quality care to all users, and this premise of the policy itself aimed at the health of the black population already presents a problem, because it seems that health professionals who are there to receive women in prenatal care exclude and exclude black mothers, therefore, the integral health policy of the black population is also being violated.”

The scholar of the issues related to the black population in Brazil highlights the institutional racism and structural racism effective and reinforced by granting treatment that differs black women and non-black women.

“Institutional racism, because it is something that occurs within a public institution, and structural racism reinforced by a treatment that insists on keeping the black people of this country in a position of subordination and inferiority”, she explains.

About the research

The study “Racial inequalities in health: prenatal care and maternal mortality in Brazil, 2014-2020″ was formulated using data from the Information System on Live Births (Sinasc) and the Mortality Information System (SIM) of the Computer Department of the Brazilian Unified Health System (DataSUS).

They refer to the period between 2014 and 2020, for which it was possible to calculate the indicators of adequate prenatal care and the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR). For the racial clipping, the document follows the official IBGE classification (Petruccelli & Saboia 2013), using both the black category, which is the aggregation of the black and brown categories.

“As the latter disaggregated, following recommendations by specialists in the area (Santos et al. 2022), in order to make explicit the complexity and nuances of the phenomenon – since race is, above all, from a sociological point of view, an essentially political element”, the text informs.

Read the research in full: