Why ‘Aftershock’ Filmmakers Were Inspired to Make a Doc About Disparities in Maternal Health Care (Video)
thewrap.comCenters for Disease Control and Prevention.Lewis Lee told Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio how she first became aware of the disproportionate numbers of preventable deaths of Black mothers and babies.“Way back in 2007, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services asked me to be the spokesperson for their infant mortality awareness raising campaign called ‘A Healthy Baby Begins With You,'” she said . “That campaign allowed me to travel the country to talk about infant health.
At the time, I didn’t know infant mortality was an issue in the United States. I didn’t know that Black babies died in three to four times the rate that white babies do.”Lewis Lee added: “I was able to go and talk to all kinds of stakeholders and discovered that when you talk about infant health, you’re really talking about a woman’s health and that women, especially Black women, were not doing well in this country.
And then I talked to lots of groups of women, Black women, who inevitably would tell me a story, someone would tell me a story, about a sister, a friend, a cousin who had died from complications of childbirth.”Eiselt said she drew inspiration from her own “traumatic” childbirth experiences.
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