New Orleans, as well as many cities in the United States, has been in the spotlight for the current upward trend of maternal mortality and morbidity rates. Each year 700 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications and for every maternal death, there are 100 severe maternal injuries. This is notable in a country that also stands out as the only developed country seeing such a trend since 1990. Shockingly, a woman born in 1990 is more likely to die from giving birth now than her mother was 29 years ago. To go further, when a mother dies from childbirth complications, the data show the baby is more likely to die before its second birthday or more likely to drop out of school.

To address this alarming trend, Merck has invested in a $500 million global initiative entitled Merck for Mothers in strategic cities so that a woman doesn't have to die while giving life. New Orleans is one of the nine cities selected to carry out Merck’s investment in Safer Childbirth Cities over a three-year period. Through this initiative they have chosen three focus area to decrease maternal mortality:

1. Empowering women to take charge of their health, make more informed choices and demand quality health;

2. Equipping health care providers by improving training, fostering quality product innovation, and inventing digital tools;

3. Strengthening health care systems by advancing quality standards, making life-saving products available and generating evidence.

IWES, along with our partner organizations the Birthmark Doula Collective and the National Birth Equity Collaborative (NBEC), will be working together to successfully implement this new initiative and expand our current work. IWES will serve as the anchor for the collaboration, building on over twenty-five years of work on issues affecting women and their families. Our work will focus on utilizing the stories of women with lived experiences and their families to:

1. Develop linkages to a city-wide perinatal community health workforce that works within the health system;

2. Create a patient-centered reporting process centering on community health workers (CHWs);

3. Coordinate Birth Equity training for health care providers within hospitals and advocate for local policies that support health along the life-course.

The Birthmark Doula Collective will serve as a community-based partner and expert on community health worker models and doula care for women in New Orleans. Their experience as doulas and birth workers gives the project direct contact with birthing individuals and their hospital experiences. NBEC will facilitate the connections between community, research institutions and systems change for children and families. They are active in local, state and national initiatives for building change and capacity so that clinical systems are informed by community voices. NBEC will help to analyze lessons learned from stories that will be used to shape Birth Equity trainings that tie together concepts of racial equity with concrete changes at the provider- and systems- levels to improve health outcomes. NBEC will also participate in developing an advocacy strategy for multi-level policy improvements and education for hospital systems, care providers, and community leaders.

Finally, IWES will co-lead qualitative interviews with families to ground the project in collective knowledge, stories, and understanding of lived experiences of women that have had both positive and negative birth outcomes. This process will support the implementation of a patient-centered reporting process and the development of robust patient advocacy mechanisms, which will be based on trauma-informed principles.

Through this project, we hope to not only uplift the stories of women’s lived experiences but also translate their stories in a meaningful way that will significantly impact the birth outcomes of women and their babies. We understand society has supported many birthing mothers in very meaningful ways, but one life lost is too many for us to not make changes so that all women have the same opportunity for a healthy birthing process. The change can only be accomplished by understanding that it is “Her Body. Her Voice. Her Baby. Her Support.”

This program is supported by funding from Merck, through Merck for
Mothers, the company’s $500 million initiative to help create a world
where no woman dies giving life. Merck for Mothers is known as MSD for
Mothers outside the United States and Canada.