October 22, 2009 The Tenneesseean
OK, men, and especially black men, it's time to ante up. As Dr. Kimberlee Wyche-Etheridge, director of the Bureau of Family, Youth and Infant Health for the Metro Public Health Department, told me Tuesday, it's crucial that men step up and fulfill their responsibilities to fatherhood.
And those responsibilities start before a child is born.
Wyche-Etheridge is one of 15 members of a new Commission on Paternal Involvement in Pregnancy Outcomes to raise public awareness of how greater involvement by expectant fathers can improve maternal and child health. The commission was convened for the first time Monday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a leading public policy and research institution based in Washington whose work focuses primarily on African-Americans and other communities of color.
The commission's work will place special emphasis on the problems of African-American fathers. When one takes a look at statistics, it is not hard to see why such emphasis is needed.
Writing in the July/August 2007 edition of FOCUS, the Joint Center's magazine, Michael C. Lu and Jessica S. Lu said racial/ethnic disparities in infant mortality continue to be a national disgrace.
"A black baby born today in the U.S. is nearly two and a half times as likely to die within the first year of life as a white baby,'' they wrote. "This black/white gap in infant mortality has been steadily increasing since 1980.''
And last December, The Tennessean's Claudia Pinto reported in a series of articles that Memphis has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. Tennessee's overall rate is fourth-worst, and the Volunteer State, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama "form a vast swath of Deep South real estate where babies die at a rate comparable to Third World countries,'' Pinto wrote.
"As a society, we've embraced the idea that it's OK to raise a family without a father,'' Wyche-Etheridge said Tuesday.
She made it plain why the involvement of expectant fathers is so important in helping to reduce the infant mortality rate.
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