Black mothers, county data highlight Douglas County birth disparities

Black mothers in Douglas County described births marked by silence, dismissal and trauma, while local public health data showed the same pattern is still showing up in infant death rates. At a forum at the Community Health Facility, 200 Maine Street in Lawrence, the stories of Robyn Wagner, Clare Nderagakura and Kiesha Mumford put names and faces to a countywide disparity that health officials say has persisted for years.

The Public Health After Dark event on April 16 brought together Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, LMH Health, LiveWell Douglas County and the Early Childhood Collective for a discussion about birth outcomes. Traci Dotson facilitated as the panelists described moments when medical care failed them. Wagner said an unfamiliar doctor did not tell her about an injury during childbirth until she later returned to her original doctor. Nderagakura said a lactation consultant refused to listen after she declined services and made her feel as if she did not know what she was doing. Mumford said she later discovered trauma from her first birth and chose a doctor in Overland Park for her second child because she felt respected there.

Those accounts matched what Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health researchers heard in focus groups in 2019 and 2020, when Black women said they felt unwelcome, stereotyped, rushed, coerced and gaslit in local care. The women also said their pregnancies felt stressful. In a county where Black infants were reported in 2021 to be twice as likely to be born prematurely or at low birth weight as white babies, the forum suggested that disrespect and poor communication are not isolated experiences. They are part of a pattern that can affect outcomes before, during and after delivery.

The county’s 2023 Community Health Assessment places those birth gaps inside a broader landscape of inequity. It identified poverty, incarceration and access to health services as major health issues, and it reported life expectancy of 80.7 years countywide, 85 years in rural Douglas County and 75.4 years in eastern Lawrence. That uneven geography underscores how health outcomes vary sharply within the same county, depending on race, income and access to care.

The concern reaches beyond Douglas County. KU School of Medicine researcher Sharla Smith has said Black infants in Kansas have been dying at two to three times the rate of white infants for more than 30 years, and that Black women face pregnancy-related death rates two to three times higher than white women. The CDC says infant mortality is a marker of a society’s health, and the U.S. rate was 5.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2022 and 5.61 in 2023.

For families looking for support now, the local network includes Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, LMH Health, LiveWell Douglas County, the Early Childhood Collective and the Kansas Birth Equity Network, which says its mission is to improve maternal, paternal and infant health through community-centered work. The forum made clear that reducing disparities will require more than education. It will take providers who listen, institutions that respond to complaints with accountability, and a county health system willing to treat respectful care as essential, not optional.