A Crisis in the Crib & A Blogging Challenge

I have written twice, quite briefly, about a campaign created by the Office on Minority Health starring Tonya Lewis Lee about the disparate rates of infant and maternal mortality in this country called "A Healthy Baby Begins With You." The campaign was created to help raise awareness of the fact that black babies are three times as likely to die in their first year of life as white babies. In addition, a recent NY Times article stated that black women in New York are seven times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. In fact, a recent article in a University of Wisconsin alumni magazine offered up the sobering statistic that babies born in Sri Lanka have better health outcomes than black babies born in Milwaukee do.

These unacceptable statistics are what prompted Ms. Lewis Lee and the Office on Minority Health to create the documentary Crisis in the Crib: Saving Our Nation's Babies in 2009. I have been wanting to see the documentary for a while and although there were screenings held in NYC, I never saw any screenings in my area. But the 36-minute documentary is now available for you to watch online and if you are about issues like women's health, motherhood, birth advocacy, breastfeeding and feminism, then you should watch it. And not only should you watch it, but you should blog about it.

I, along with Jill of The Unnecesarean and Courtroom Mama*, want you to take 36 minutes to watch this documentary and then write a blog post about any aspect of the film that speaks to you the loudest. After you've written your post, link to it here by July 2. Jill & Courtroom Mama will choose their favorite post, and on July 4th it will appear on The Unnecesarean blog, along with links to all of the bloggers who participated.

Are you up for the challenge?

*Thank you to Courtroom Mama for writing this excellent blog post and inspiring a host of bloggers to write about this issue that is so important, yet is not being discussed enough. 

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