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December 02, 2008
On language and motherhood
A couple weeks ago, I saw an article titled "Motherhood is not a Universal Experience" on the Global Health Policy blog at the Center for Global Development. The author writes,
The difficult birth this week of a new baby girl to one of our staff has reminded us of the stark differences between becoming a mother in the rich world and in the poor world. The difference is not so much that having a baby is without risk for rich-world women: ask your colleagues and neighbors about their own experiences of childbirth and you’ll be surprised how many dramatic stories emerge. In my own case, a flawless pregnancy suddenly turned life-threatening due to pre-eclampsia at 32 weeks gestation.
The difference is in how childbirth happens – and how frequently it can mean death for a developing country woman. Had I been a poor woman in a developing country, the chances are good that neither me nor my twins would have survived. The lifetime chance of dying from maternal causes is one in 61 for women in developing country. The same risk has a probability of 1 in 2800 in the developed world (PRB, 2005) . Wherever they live, rich women benefit from better health and pre-natal care that greatly improve their chances for safe delivery. But childbirth can still be a terrifying experience.
This got me thinking about what childbirth is like for limited English proficiency women here in the U.S. Naturally, I did what any self-respecting med student would do: I turned to PubMed. To my surprise, in spite of the expected evidence confirming that non-English-speaking immigrants experience poorer-quality primary care (Pippins et al., 2007), have less access to mental health care (Sentell et al., 2007), and often do not receive recommended health services such as cardiovascular screening and flu shots (Cheng et al., 2007), there was also evidence that being Hispanic and non-acculturated was predictive of a similar incidence of low birth weight and infant mortality to that experienced by white, non-Hispanic women (Callister and Birkhead, 2002). As one author puts it, "Despite having many of the risk factors for poor pregnancy outcomes, Mexican immigrants have superior birth outcomes when compared to U.S.-born women. Social support, familism, healthy diet, limited use of cigarettes and alcohol, and religion may play a role in improved outcomes. The superior outcomes diminish with the process of acculturation as the individual adapts to her new culture," (Page, 2004).
So it is true that motherhood is not a universal experience, but nor is it a national experience, nor an experience determined by socio-economic status alone. Page posits some factors which may help to explain the apparent positive impact of being an unacculturated mother in the United States, and it's well worth examining their protective potential. The larger message however, is that globalization exerts complex influences on the individual and therefore on the community. While one might expect a poor, non-English speaker to have subpar perinatal outcomes, it turns out that the cultures of health which some Hispanic women bring with them when they immigrate actually mitigate other risk factors. While we often assume that outcomes are predicated upon the disparities endemic to the United States, then, we cannot lose sight of the values and practices which immigrants bring to our health care system and the changes such imported attitudes engender.
Posted by Ben Brown at December 2, 2008 12:00 PM
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