Blaming Poor Women for the Ills of Poverty

The news is bad enough, not surprising (tragically), and intuitively related to the current madministration's punitive social policies, yet the tone of this article takes the tack that it's fat, lazy welfare mothers who are the problem. This amplified dishonesty and willful disregard for the harsh realities of the poor makes me sick. A better, more informed Press, please.

In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South.

The main causes of infant death in poor Southern regions included premature and low-weight births; Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is linked to parental smoking and unsafe sleeping positions as well as unknown causes; congenital defects; and, among poor black teenage mothers in particular, deaths from accidents and disease.

Dr. William Langston, an obstetrician at the Mississippi Department of Health, said in a telephone interview that officials could not yet explain the sudden increase and were investigating. Dr. Langston said the state was working to extend prenatal care and was experimenting with new outreach programs. But, he added, “programs take money, and Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation.”

Doctors who treat poor women say they are not surprised by the reversal. “I think the rise is real, and it’s going to get worse,” said Dr. Bouldin Marley, an obstetrician at a private clinic in Clarksdale since 1979. “The mothers in general, black or white, are not as healthy,” Dr. Marley said, calling obesity and its complications a main culprit. Obesity makes it more difficult to do diagnostic tests like ultrasounds and can lead to hypertension and diabetes, which can cause the fetus to be undernourished, he said. Another major problem, Dr. Marley said, is that some women arrive in labor having had little or no prenatal care. “I don’t think there’s a lack of providers or facilities,” he said. “Some women just don’t have the get up and go.”

But social workers say that the motivation of poor women is not so simply described, and it can be affected by cuts in social programs and a dearth of transportation as well as low self esteem. “If you didn’t have a car and had to go 60 miles to see a doctor, would you go very often?” said Ramona Beardain, director of Delta Health Partners.

The group runs a federally financed program, Healthy Start, that sends social workers and nurses to counsel pregnant teenagers and new mothers in seven counties of the Delta. “If they’re in school they miss the day; if they’re working they don’t get paid,” Ms. Beardain said. Poverty has climbed in Mississippi in recent years, and things are tougher in other ways for poor women, with cuts in cash welfare and changes in the medical safety net.

What? Is that reality finally setting in? I know it's much easier to float judgmentally along on a cloud of (poor, black) mother blaming. In the meantime, babies are dying, mothers are unhealthy, communities are devastated, and racism is alive and well and thriving in the nation's most disadvantaged (and I wonder why) communities.

Comments

[ja]

“I don’t think there’s a lack of providers or facilities,” he said. “Some women just don’t have the get up and go.”

No he effing DIDN'T.

ae, hon, could you bring a broom and vacuum cleaner so we can gather up the pieces of my head, which just exploded?

This might be the first time in my life that I have ever heard "get up and go" refer to a car or reliable public transportation. Yeah, I'll pretend that I think that's what he meant, and not some ignorant [various expletives deleted] [more expletives deleted] bullcrap.

Gawd.

[arse poetica]

ja, EXACTLY what you said, hon. What kind of willfully ignorant, paternalistic, racist, sexist bullcrap is that?? Sheeeeit. It's like those idiots who asked why the poor folks in New Orleans didn't just buy their way out of trouble, as if these folks have expendable income just lying around to hire cabs and rent vans and pay for months-long hotel stays, not to mention food and medicine. I swear to God, I could go crazy sometimes for the sheer ignorance of our sisters and brothers' plight in our own country.

Back where we're from, we know the truth, don't we?

[handdrummer]

“I don’t think there’s a lack of providers or facilities,” he said. “Some women just don’t have the get up and go.”

God this makes my blood boil. My mother and the women in our community busted their butts, strained their hearts and drove themselves to early deaths to raise their kids with very little in the way of material resources to accomplish the task.

To imply, as many neocon ideologues do, that they were lazy and somehow at fault for their place in the world is inhuman and cruel. But then, I repeat myself.

[Doctor stroke]

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