Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, founder and director of the Center for Maternal Health Advancement, is a nationally recognized scholar, advocate, and leader in Black maternal health.
University of Massachusetts Chan Memorial Medical School
On the heels of consecutive weeks dedicated to Black Maternal Health and Women's Health, maternal mortality disparities are once again in the national spotlight. But too often, public attention arrives only in high-stakes moments or crisis—during pregnancy, at birth, postpartum harm, or in the wake of preventable loss. The headlines ask what went wrong in a delivery room, emergency department, or postpartum ward, while far less attention is given to the years—sometimes decades—of inequity that made those outcomes more likely in the first place.
A growing movement in maternal health is now challenging this limited framework. Among those leading this shift is Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, Professor of Black Maternal Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Under Dr. Amutah-Onukagha’s leadership, the newly expanded Center for Maternal Health Advancement in Boston, Massachusetts is offering a broader, lifespan-based vision of maternal health equity that centers Black women across the full arc of their lives.
Black maternal health has long illuminated the consequences of fragmented care systems, structural racism, underinvestment in preventive care, and the unequal distribution of medical resources. As Dr. Amutah-Onukagha explains:
“Maternal health is not defined by pregnancy alone. It is shaped by access to care, chronic stress, reproductive autonomy, and support across a woman’s life. The Center for Maternal Health Advancement allows us to deepen our impact by advancing equitable, dignified care for every mother facing barriers to quality healthcare.”
By centering Black women’s experiences, researchers and advocates have exposed the ways inequities compound across generations and across institutions from hospitals and insurance systems to workplaces and public policy. Black women are not only experiencing worse outcomes; their experiences reveal how health systems fail across the lifespan.
A maternal health equity approach address the structural conditions that shape maternal health outcomes before, during, and beyond pregnancy.
getty
Black women remain three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. For too long, maternal health systems have been organized around crisis response rather than prevention. Black women are frequently studied at the point of harm: when complications occur, when pregnancies become dangerous, when postpartum needs are unmet, or when deaths become data points. But a lifespan approach grounded in reproductive justice and health equity asks a different question. Instead of asking only, “What went wrong?” it asks, “What conditions made this outcome more likely?”
Research on Black maternal morbidity and mortality consistently shows that disparities are driven not only by individual health conditions, but by structural and social conditions. Maternal health does not begin with a positive pregnancy test, and it does not end at delivery or the six-week postpartum visit. It reflects a lifetime of exposure to care, or the lack of it, and the cumulative effects of systemic inequity.
The future of maternal health will require more than reducing mortality. It will require transforming the conditions that make preventable harm predictable.
The narrow prenatal through postpartum window of care approach obscures the broader conditions shaping Black women’s health across their lifespan. Black women are disproportionately impacted by hypertension, cardiovascular disease, uterine fibroids, chronic stress, and barriers to quality reproductive healthcare—all factors that influence maternal outcomes.
Even when underlying health conditions are not present, racial disparities persist. They are also more likely to experience discrimination and racial bias within healthcare settings, have their pain dismissed, and navigate fragmented systems of care. This means that Black maternal health must be addressed beyond clinical encounters in delivery rooms and in medical schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, clinics, public policy, environmental justice work, and community-based care. It requires expanding access to doulas and midwives, improving postpartum coverage, diversifying the health care workforce, addressing implicit bias, and strengthening preventive care long before pregnancy begins.
Although Black people make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they represent only about 5% of active physicians, and Black women make up only about 2% of physicians overall.
Representation alone will not solve structural racism in medicine, but it matters for trust, cultural humility, patient advocacy, and institutional change. At a moment when maternal health conversations risk becoming overly narrow, politicized, or reactive, the Center for Maternal Health Advancement offers a different model: one grounded in equity, collaboration, evidence-based advocacy, and sustained investment in women’s health across the lifespan.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha recently expanded the Center for Black Maternal Health & Reproductive Justice into the Center for Maternal Health Advancement, broadening its focus across the female lifespan.
Center for Maternal Health Advancement, Tufts University
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha’s leadership is field-changing. Her work builds on its Black maternal health and reproductive justice legacy while focusing on maternal health across the entire female lifespan: adolescence, reproductive years, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, and beyond. This expanded scope addresses the interconnected realities shaping maternal outcomes across communities.
As Dr. Amutah-Onukagha notes:
“We cannot separate maternal health from the broader realities of women’s health. Chronic disease, mental health, reproductive care, and access to preventive services all influence what happens during pregnancy and postpartum. Supporting women across the lifespan is one of the most important ways we can improve maternal outcomes.”
The Center for Maternal Health Advancement’s expanded model positions Black maternal health not as a silo, but as a lens that reveals broader systemic failures and pathways for repair. What makes the Center’s approach especially significant is its insistence that Black women are not simply subjects of research, but producers of knowledge and architects of solutions. Through community-engaged research, policy advocacy, education initiatives, and partnerships with doulas, clinicians, and organizers, the Center integrates evidence-based research with lived experience.
The Center’s values—equity, evidence-based advocacy, collaboration, and lifespan focus—offer a roadmap for research, policy, clinical care, community engagement, workforce development, education and advocacy. This practical blueprint insists that every mother deserves high-quality care and respect. Evidence-based advocacy uses culturally grounded research and lived experience to shape programs and policy. Collaboration brings communities, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers into shared work that remains grounded in a lifespan focus.
That framing carries implications far beyond healthcare systems alone.
A lifespan approach requires policymakers to think differently about healthcare access, housing insecurity, and chronic stress. It must also mean paid leave, Medicaid expansion, postpartum coverage, childcare, income support, and environmental justice as maternal health interventions. For workplaces, it asks employers to consider how workplace conditions shape long-term health outcomes and to consider how flexibility, benefits, anti-discrimination protections are part of health equity. For health systems, it means maternal health must include preventive care, chronic disease management, reproductive autonomy, and culturally responsive care. Healthcare institutions must move beyond reactive care toward continuity, prevention, and trust-building. For philanthropy, it means investing in Black women leaders who are already building the models institutions need. And it pushes researchers to ask not only who experiences disparities, but why those disparities persist structurally over time.
Through the leadership of Dr. Amutah-Onukagha and the Center for Maternal Health Advancement, what is emerging is not simply a broader definition of maternal health, but a more accurate one that reflects how health is actually lived, accumulated, and experienced over time.
If the nation is serious about improving maternal health outcomes, Black women’s leadership, scholarship, and lived realities cannot remain at the margins of that conversation. They must remain at its center.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha is recognized at the Annual EXTRAordinary Women’s Reception in Boston for her leadership advancing research, policy, and community-driven solutions that center Black women and maternal health equity.
City of Boston Office, Women's Advancement
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。