Greater Lawrence Family Health Center’s Centering Pregnancy Program—providing culturally sensitive prenatal care, perinatal behavioral health support and breastfeeding support—was one of 11 institutions around the state Tuesday to receive a state Maternal Health Equity Grant.
Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell named the Health Center, with locations in Lawrence, Haverhill and Methuen, as one of the grant recipients at Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury, where she hosted a roundtable discussion about maternal health equity.
“We each have a role to play in addressing the maternal health crisis in Massachusetts where, for example, Black birthing people experience the highest rates of labor and delivery complications compared to other races and ethnicities,” said Campbell. “Our Maternal Health Equity Grants will provide much-needed funds to nonprofit organizations across the state that have demonstrated their ability to tackle this ongoing crisis. Together, we are making clear that the safety and wellbeing of all those who give birth and parent matters and contributes to the health and success of all of us.”
Greater Lawrence Family Health Center plans to use the $135,611 grant to expand its group medical visit program for maternal health patients. The group receives support and education about childbirth which includes individual medical care, in both English and Spanish. The Health Center serves a largely low-income population with a majority of Spanish-speaking, Latinx patients.
Grants also address the need for more culturally competent healthcare professionals by increasing access to the doula workforce. Money comes from settlements reached by the attorney general’s office.
Campbell established the Maternal Health Equity Grant to reduce disparities by increasing access to culturally competent maternal health support services.
According to a recent report by the Department of Public Health, severe maternal morbidity, which involves unexpected complications of labor and delivery that result in significant consequences to a birthing person’s health, nearly doubled in Massachusetts between 2011and 2020. Black, non-Hispanic birthing people consistently experiencing the highest rates of complication. “To improve peripartum health outcomes,” the report concludes, “state policy efforts must continue to target structural racism and ableism, as well as other socioeconomic and community drivers of adverse maternal outcomes, including access to and quality of primary and prenatal care.”