Who uses pregnancy-related care? The first and most obvious answer is people giving birth. But their partners are an overlooked and important part of prenatal care, birth, and antenatal care.
Black women have a 49% higher rate of preterm birth than other women. Studies have shown how Black women and other women of color face discrimination within healthcare settings that contributes to disparities in pregnancy outcomes. However, this racism extends to partners as well, especially men of color.
Neonatal Intensive Care Units are stressful environments for fathers, as well as mothers, but nurses often ignore stressed fathers to care for mothers. Research shows that partner involvement may help prevent preterm birth, yet little is known about how a preterm birth affects men of color because many past studies on the role of fathers in pregnancy were done in the United Kingdom or Norway with majority-White populations.
There is a need for health care professionals to build trust with men of color by supporting them in their perceived roles, hearing any negative experiences they’ve had when previously accessing health care services, and giving them all the necessary and requested information about a partner’s care.
A recent study helmed by Brittany Edwards at the California Preterm Birth Initiative asked the question: “What about men of color?” Edwards and her team wanted to see how men, whose partners were at elevated risk of preterm birth, experienced pregnancy, birth, and several months post-birth. A focus group was conducted with 12 men of color who had recently become fathers to a child born preterm or with a related complication.
The results revealed four key themes: (1) men felt like they need to be “the rock” for a partner; (2) men saw pregnancy as “a blessing;” (3) men wanted to be told everything about care and felt they weren’t being informed; and (4) men felt like they and their partners were treated “like a guinea pig” in health care settings.
The first two themes show positive feelings and strong connections between fathers and their families. The latter two themes reveal mistrust of health care systems. The men in the study reported feeling unheard and uninformed about the care their partners received, similar to feelings reported by women of color in prior studies. After his wife received a Cesarean section she felt under-informed about, one respondent in the study asked, “What’s the purpose of all that detail and coming to all those appointments? What’s the purpose of all her work and effort when it looks like they didn’t even use it?”
Improving maternal outcomes for women of color in the United States should be a top priority of a public health mission. Increasing access to nurse midwives is one proven way to achieve this goal, and policies are being litigated in states. The authors argue that another way of improving maternal outcomes is to better involve men in perinatal care. There is a need for health care professionals to build trust with men of color by supporting them in their perceived roles, hearing any negative experiences they’ve had when previously accessing health care services, and giving them all the necessary and requested information about a partner’s care.