March 28, 2023
With Antelope Valley sprawling over northern Los Angeles County’s vast desert region, social services can be spread out and hard to access. But come this April, Black moms and birthing parents will have a one-stop shop for health and wellness at the new Antelope Valley Maternity Home in Lancaster.
To reduce poor birth outcomes in the area’s Black population and ensure birth is a safe, healthy and joyous experience, the Antelope Valley Maternity Home will provide wraparound services to Black expecting and new parents in the region. According to L.A. County’s Department of Public Health, Antelope Valley has one of the county’s highest Black infant and maternal mortality rates. And across the United States, Black mothers and newborns fare worst of all racial groups when it comes to birthing outcomes.
In a 2022 study, the National Bureau of Economic Research examined approximately 2 million birth records in California to better understand economic inequality in infant and maternal health. What researchers found was that racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality rates were linked to structural racism, not socioeconomic status. According to the study, maternal mortality rates among low-income white women were lower, at 350 per 1,000 live births, than that of high-income Black women, at 457 per 1,000 live births. Babies born to Black mothers were more likely to be premature or underweight.
These facts illustrate how race significantly affects the quality of care and intervention and underscores the need for centers like the Antelope Valley Maternity Home that are tailored to supporting Black birthing people as a critical component of reducing this disparity.
“This is really groundbreaking,” said TaVia Wooley-Iles, executive director of the EmpowerTHEM Collective, a health advocacy nonprofit and a key force behind the center. “The African American community here is small, but we are sending a loud message that the community is supported in the Antelope Valley.”
After years of planning, the project launched last September under the leadership of Charles Drew University’s Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence in partnership with the Antelope Valley Community Action Team of the Los Angeles County African American Infant and Maternal Mortality Prevention Initiative (AAIMM). Dedicated to addressing the disproportionately high rates of Black infant and maternal deaths and ensuring healthy and joyous births for Black families in L.A. County, AAIMM is led by the L.A. Department of Public Health in partnership with First 5 LA. Other members include L.A. County’s Departments of Health Services and of Mental Health, community organizations, mental and health care providers, funders, and community members.
“This is really groundbreaking. The African American community here is small, but we are sending a loud message that the community is supported in the Antelope Valley.” – TaVia Wooley-Iles, executive director of the EmpowerTHEM Collective
Vital to AAIMM’s mission are its Community Action Teams (CATs), regional partnerships that consult, inform and engage their community on all AAIMM strategies. CATs are also responsible for driving locally-based actions that address the unique needs and challenges of their respective communities. In L.A. County’s Service Planning Area (SPA) 6, for example, the Antelope Valley Community Action Team has been working toward increasing local access to high-quality care and support for Black moms and birthing parents. The idea of a maternal home made perfect sense.
Finding a centralized location for the new maternity home was key. The City of Lancaster offered to house the project at one of its Neighborhood Health Homes — sites that provide free space to nonprofit partners offering physical and behavioral health services — in the eastern area of the city. Once the location was selected, Antelope Valley Community Action Team leaders built out a network of Black-led organizations to offer their services at the Home.
The Team’s persistence and hard work have paid off. The Antelope Valley Maternity Home is now slated to open during Black Maternal Health Week, which takes place April 11-17. Services will include breastfeeding and lactation support, doula resources, mental health counseling, yoga and wellness, and health advocacy. The Home will also serve as an information hub for parents, with workshops and seminars on topics such as infant car seat installation, cooking and more. In addition to providing services for birthing parents, the Antelope Valley Maternity Home will serve as a hub for community-based birth workers such as doulas and lactation consultants.
“It came together pretty nicely,” said Kim Watson, executive director of Project Joy, a Lancaster-based nonprofit working to empower and strengthen families, which served as a key force behind the Antelope Valley Maternity Home. “This will really be an anchor for the community.”
Watson and Wooley-Iles, who are both members of AAIMM’s Antelope Valley Community Action Team, expect the new Home to attract a large outpouring of clients.
“Each of the participating service providers will bring their clientele, plus the Community Action Team will reach out to area hospitals and medical providers to let them know about the Maternity Home,” Wooley-Iles said. “The goal is to serve all Black birthing parents in the region. About 950 babies are born to Black mothers in the Antelope Valley annually, according to county public health statistics.”
The Antelope Valley Maternity Home is an expansion of the maternal home model that was opened last October in South Los Angeles by the Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence. Funding for the Lancaster-based Home was provided by the Perinatal Equity Initiative under the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
“The Antelope Valley Maternity Home is the embodiment of the power and impact of the collaboration that is at the heart of the AAIMM Prevention Initiative, in particular the AAIMM Community Action Teams, who bring the wisdom of community voices with lived experience and advocate for healthy and joyous births.” – Dr. Melissa Franklin, the director of LADPH’s Division of Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health
L.A. County’s maternity homes were inspired by similar maternity homes in Cuba that Dr. Brandi Sims Desjolais, co-founder and co-director of the Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence, saw first-hand while on a trip to the island to study public health. Impressed with how the community centers worked to support expecting and new parents and newborns, she wanted to set up something similar in South Los Angeles.
“It has been really well-received,” Desjolais said. “Our plan is to have a maternity home in every SPA [Special Planning Area] of the county.”
She went on to note that maternity homes were designed to be places where expectant parents felt welcome, with an environment that was “calming, warm and familiar.”
“We want people to just come in and have a cup of tea and read a book,” Desjolais added. “Where they can relax.”
Desjolais said that the next step in making this plan come true would be to establish a Community Land Trust that would purchase existing sites to be repurposed as maternity centers. This would ensure that maternal homes become permanent fixtures in the community, she said.
These and other local initiatives to reduce maternal and infant death rates cannot come soon enough. In L.A. County, public health statistics show that Black women die from perinatal and other birth complications at four times the rate of white women, while Black infants are three times more likely to die before reaching their first birthday compared to white infants.
“We are grateful to the City of Lancaster, the Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence, and the Antelope Valley Community Action Team for their innovative partnership, which will provide a compassionate and culturally grounded village of support to Black pregnant women/people,” said Dr. Melissa Franklin, the director of LADPH’s Division of Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health. “The Antelope Valley Maternity Home is the embodiment of the power and impact of the collaboration that is at the heart of the AAIMM Prevention Initiative, in particular the AAIMM Community Action Teams, who bring the wisdom of community voices with lived experience and advocate for healthy and joyous births.”
AAIMM sees the Antelope Valley Maternity Home as one of several solutions taking place alongside other community-driven and systems-change efforts for ending the crisis. Wooley-Iles hopes maternal homes will help mitigate the effects of structural racism that lead to poor birth outcomes for Black women. The beauty of the model is that it can be easily replicated and altered to fit the needs of any community.
“The disparity in Black infant and maternal mortality is a national health crisis,” Wooley-Iles emphasized. “This is a solution.”
