Two research articles have been recently published in international public health journals discussing findings from a larger maternal mortality study funded by NIH and led by Dr. Maeve Wallace.

In one of the articles, published in Social Science & Medicine – Population Health journal (Vol. 9), co-authors Dr. Dovile Vilda, Dr. Maeve Wallace, Ms. Lauren Dyer, Dr. Emily Harville and Dr. Katherine Theall examined the association between state-level income inequality and pregnancy-related mortality among non-Hispanic black and white women in the US. Their findings highlighted the differential impact of socioeconomic inequality on pregnancy-related mortality along racial lines and showed that state-level income inequality – both contemporaneous and lagged – was significantly associated with black but not white pregnancy-related mortality and contributed to increasing racial inequity in pregnancy-related mortality across the US. The full publication is accessible online.

In the second article, published in BMC Pregnancy Childbirth (Vol. 19, Iss. 1), MAC research analyst Lauren Dyer along with Dr. Rachel Hardeman (Division of Health Policy and Management, University of Minnesota School of Public Health), Dr. Dovile Vilda (MAC Postdoc Fellow), and MAC faculty Dr. Katherine Theall and Dr. Maeve Wallace, analyzed the links between parish-level prevalence of jail incarceration within the black population and adverse birth outcomes among non-Hispanic black women in Louisiana. Their results revealed significant associations between the prevalence of black individuals incarcerated in Louisiana jails and estimated risk of preterm birth which suggests that mass incarceration may be an underlying cause of the persistent inequities in reproductive health outcomes experienced by black women in Louisiana. The full article is available online and a research brief is available on the resources page of our website.  

Citations:
Vilda, D., Wallace, M., Dyer, L., Harville, E., & Theall, K. (2019). Income inequality and racial disparities in pregnancy-related mortality in the US. SSM - Population Health, 9, 100477. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100477
Dyer, L., Hardeman, R., Vilda, D., Theall, K., & Wallace, M. (2019). Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 19(1), 525. doi:10.1186/s12884-019-2690-z