A North Carolina Democrat is trying, for the fourth time, to improve maternal health care in the state. Filed by Chatham County Senator Natalie Murdock, Senate Bill 571, entitled Momnibus 3.0, would create two grant programs. One of the programs, the Maternal Care Access Grant program, would award competitive grants to community organizations that work on the prevention of maternal mortality among Black women. The bill would also create the Perinatal Education Grant Program, which would be awarded to companies that would establish or expand perinatal education programs in rural areas that can, at times, be underserved.
In addition to these grant programs, the bill would call for funding for lactation consultant training programs and require the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to partner with Historically Black Colleges to provide bias training for maternal care professionals.
Murdock held a press conference to discuss the importance of the bill. “The data shows us Black women continue to be three to four times more likely to die from childbirth, even with education,” Murdock explained. In addition to the higher mortality rate for childbirth, Black women are the only group of women whose mortality rate has not dropped, according to data from the CDC.
Speakers at the press conference included Charity Watkins, an assistant professor of social work at North Carolina Central University, and Gabriel Scott, an MPA with the North Carolina State Coalition of the National Council of Negro Women, who told the room about the challenges they have faced when seeking maternal care.
“I’m highly educated [and] I am able to advocate for myself,” Watkins said. “Yet, I was dismissed, and my symptoms could have easily resulted in me losing my life.”
Scott shared a story with a similar sentiment. “I was telling the nurses and the staff, ‘Hey, I’m in full-blown labor. I need some medication, please, for pain management,’ I actually was ignored,” Scott said. “I needed pain medication, I needed help, I needed something. They did not listen.”
The goal of the bill is to make these occurrences less common than they currently are, and an OBGYN in the state, Dr. Michelle Benoit-Wilson, says the bill is exactly what is needed right now. Wilson called for politics to be put aside for the betterment of the women seeking maternal care. “We need to stop using politics as a bouncing ball, as opposed to recognizing the core problem, which is that women are dying, and they shouldn’t be,” Benoit-Wilson said.
There is also a version of this bill in the House, House Bill 725, sponsored by Representatives Julie von Haefen and Zack Hawkins. Murdock has attempted to pass this bill several times before in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Though those bills never made it out of committees, and the current bill has no Republican support, von Haefen said that, regardless, getting the message out is important. “Even if we can’t get the bill passed in the General Assembly right now, we need to build the momentum so that when we finally are in a position to get some of these things passed, we have the advocates.”
