By Evan Silvera
For The Diamondback
Dr. Michael Lu stood before a crowd of University of Maryland students and faculty and recalled the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal.”
“Two hundred forty years later, that truth is not so self-evident,” said Lu, the associate administrator for maternal and child health at the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Lu focused on racial and ethnic health disparities during a talk in the public health school Tuesday, the first installment of the family science department’s Grand Rounds lecture series this semester. It was standing-room only in the school’s Friedgen Family Student Lounge.
“A black baby born today is more than twice as likely to die in the first year of life than a white baby,” Lu said. “This problem unites all of us in this room.”
Lu challenged many of the explanations offered by scholars about why such disparities regarding infant mortality exist.
Some say genetics, behavior and socioeconomic status influence the discrepancy, but Lu said those factors fail to adequately explain the gap.
For example, he said, more white women report smoking during pregnancy than black women, but black women still have higher infant mortality rates. This led Lu and numerous other experts in the field to discredit the behavioral explanation as an independent causal factor of the gap.
Lu also cited research showing that black women who hold doctorate degrees have higher infant mortality rates than Hispanic women who never graduated from high school, providing evidence that the socioeconomic argument for the gap is flawed.
Lu instead looks at the problem from a “life course perspective,” which he defined as “a way of looking at life not as discontinued stages, but as an integrated continuum.”
This approach is embraced by this university’s family science department, said Sandra Quinn, senior associate director of the Center for Health Equity and director of Maternal and Child Health doctorate program in the public health school.
“We believe that what happens to you throughout your life course has impacts later on,” Quinn said.
Lu said his research has found preterm birth as the leading cause of racial and ethnic disparities in infant mortality rates. To help resolve these issues, prenatal care quality must be improved, healthcare access expanded and institutionalized racism undone.
“If we really want to close this gap, we have to start taking action much before pregnancy,” Lu said.
For junior Jenna Caraher, Lu’s lecture opened her eyes to issues of health disparities.
“I definitely can now see that the disparity greatly affects prenatal racial and ethnic minorities,” said the kinesiology major.
Lu said that he didn’t come from an educated or wealthy family, but “none of that mattered when we immigrated to this country” and pursued the American dream.
“My two little girls, the granddaughters of a woman who had to drop out of fifth grade, can grow up in a country to be anything they want to be,” he said. “If you still believe in America’s greatness and that every child deserves a fair shot, together let’s fight to close these gaps and to give every child and family the chance to fulfill their potential.”
