Transcript – Living with Fear: A Qualitative Inquiry with Childbearing Black Women
Howdy, Sharon Dormire, professor of nursing at Texas A&M, I had the honor of leading a wonderful team in our T-3 award exploring a significant issue for our country. Specifically, we were looking at. The stressors women experience, Black women experience in childbearing, you are probably familiar with the data that Black women, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are double and triple the risk for most. Issues and health issues related to pregnancy, as well as birth outcomes for their babies like prematurity, and this has been studied for quite a long time, actually. We’ve gone back as far as 50 years in the literature and found significant studies about why this disparity exists. And we haven’t solved it in that period of time. Lots of different models about why it’s occurring. And we were very interested in how. How racism and stress affect. The women, however, what we really found when we did our our literature search is that nobody has really asked the women what the stressors are. We make assumptions as researchers and put it on the women is that has to be their stress as opposed to hearing their voices. So our study was using a phenomenological approach to interview women and find out what those stressors are. We ended up we interviewed, but we use focus groups and individuals dialogues. And we ended up with eight women who spoke with us about their concerns. We did not identify stress or racism at all in our questions. Our questions were were. More global and what were your concerns, what do you worry about, things like that and women let us to some information. That is shocking to me as a mom, what the biggest surprise that we heard from the women and we heard it so strongly is that they have a fear. They live in fear for their Black sons and their husbands every day. Live in fear, the description, we put a few things on our poster that are really the exemplary statements, but there are more, many, many more that we could share. They said, I actually feel guilty about bringing him or her son that she was expecting into this world.
He can’t wear a hoodie, things like that. He could be killed for.
He’s going to be a Black a Black young man one day, so that always worries me. I guess I find myself praying a lot more. Them being killed, I fear for their life every single day that struck us as researchers is very powerful and. Important for us to pay attention, imagine the stress of worrying that you have a son who may not live to be an adult. Women also expressed a love of the statement. Can’t I just be a mom? They were very aware of in health care and social services and things they do that they’re treated differently. And she’s the one woman said that gets in your head. I cry when I think about it. Another woman said, oh, she’s probably a single Black mom. OK, that’s how you see me. Can’t I just be a mom? And other women identified the fact that because they were Black, they were probably viewed as single on welfare and not supported just having children. But there was also this theme of hope. They had strength and hope that they expressed as a woman. We are very strong and we like to push back. So I’m just saying to a made Black woman, just stay strong. And so they see themselves as strength. There was also a lot of things in the strength with faith. I like this.
Another woman said regarding strength and hope for her children. She wanted to say, yes, you are Black, but think of all the things you can change in the world. And that’s so illustrative of the hope that was expressed. So, we’re we are the first ones to identify these kinds of fears. In research from the women, we are preparing to launch an Internet national Internet study where we can collect the stories of women and look for their fears and their strengths so that we can maybe find ways to change prenatal and perinatal care to improve health outcomes for women of color.
Thank you for listening.