Advocates for maternal health and well-being gathered in Detroit Thursday night to call for more support for mothers.
Advocates for maternal health and well-being gathered in Detroit Thursday night to call for more support for mothers.
During the State of the Mama event, advocates pushed to take cash assistance programs for pregnant and new mothers statewide, expand childcare access, and require employers to provide paid parental leave.
New mother and advocate Nyah Phillips said state policies regarding motherhood are reactive rather than proactive. For example, Phillips said the state is behind when it comes to helping families be together during pregnancy and after childbirth.
“Can the father get paternity leave? Can the father get paid leave as well? Because supporting the fathers is supporting the whole household, which supports the kids. I think a lot of these things are no-brainers. But there’s not really proactive policymaking that’s happening,” Phillips told reporters.
The group Mothering Justice Action Fund hosted the night. Founder Danielle Atkinson said policymakers need to put moms in the middle of their work.
“It turns out when we invest in mothers, everyone wins. And that’s what leadership looks like when government chooses to center families. And it is on us to demand that leaders do so,” Atkinson said during opening remarks.
She criticized policymakers for not “meeting this moment” when it comes to helping some of the most vulnerable people.
Atkinson and others blamed the country’s immigration crackdown for deterring some mothers from seeking medical care for themselves and their children. That’s as immigration detentions are taking place in areas that had been considered off-limits, including on hospital grounds.
Fatou Seydi-Sarr leads the African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs. When asked during a panel discussion what immigrant families are going through, she painted a tough picture.
“When you have children that are under the age of 5 or 6 and you know that you might walk out the door and don’t come home, so this is what we see right now in our community,” Seydi-Sarr said. “You don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like. But you also know that because you might be an asylum seeker or so-on and so-forth that you don’t have access to health care. So, if you get pregnant, nobody cares about you.”
The Michigan Legislature is currently split between Democratic and Republican control. That has meant relatively few bills are passing both chambers, creating new challenges for any policy priority.
A bill package to address racial disparities in maternal health care has been stalled in the House of Representatives for months after passing the Senate last April.
Several lawmakers and candidates for state and federal office attended the Detroit event Thursday.
State Rep. Stephanie Young (D-Detroit) chairs the state Legislature’s Detroit caucus. Young said she’s proud of assistance programs that have received funding and believes bills to lower the cost of housing will get through this year.
But she said other priorities, like the creation of a water affordability program, may have to wait until after the upcoming general election.
“Things that we can get done, we get done and we don’t stop. But there’s no reason to not be ready. That’s the thing that they say. If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. We’re going to be ready come 2027 to do even more,” Young said.
Despite the gridlock at the state level, some candidates looked to the federal government for more luck next year.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidates state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) and former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed participated. Their primary opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-MI 11) did not attend.
The candidates mostly agreed on top issues like the need for universal health care.
“I think people are sick and tired of being held hostage to big corporations. I think we have the opportunity to guarantee every single person cradle to grave coverage, without having to worry about a co-pay, premium or deductible,” El-Sayed told reporters.
Both he and McMorrow said one of the keys to getting things done was meeting people where they’re at rather than talking down to them.
McMorrow said she saw the distrust in public health as one of the bigger system failures of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s especially as measles and other previously eradicated illnesses in the U.S. are coming back because not enough people are vaccinating in some places.
“What happened during the pandemic was every institution failed working moms. Childcare centers were closed, casinos were open, none of it made sense to people, and when that happens, you lose people,” McMorrow said
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