As families across North Texas prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas is uniting the community around an important goal: ensuring that all mothers have access to the care that they and their children need to thrive.
United Way’s focus in this area is born of deep inequities in our state’s maternal health care landscape. Across Texas, Black maternal health has become a crisis. Black pregnant women and mothers are dying at unacceptably high rates, and it’s vital for all of us to do everything in our power to reverse this trend.
United Way of Metropolitan Dallas drives transformative change and advances racial equity in the areas of education, income and health. An urgent component of that work involves raising awareness of harmful health disparities, providing new moms and mothers-to-be with the resources necessary to thrive, and advocating for legislation that expands health care access and brings greater equity to maternal health care.
United Way works with community organizations, corporate partners and individual change-seekers to achieve these important goals. One example of this work is Doorways to Health, a partnership with Kimberly-Clark designed to improve health outcomes for mothers and young children, focusing on Black maternal health.
Black maternal health is in crisis
The United States has the highest maternal death rate among similarly developed countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2021, our country had more than 10 times the rate of maternal deaths as other high-income countries.
Black women in America face the worst maternal outcomes. High rates of Black maternal mortality span every income level, education level, socioeconomic status, overall health level, prenatal background and mental health status.
The situation is especially dire in Texas, where Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at two to three times the rate of white women, according to the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee.
What is behind these disparities? Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that Black women typically begin receiving prenatal care much later in their pregnancy, if at all. Black patients also are more likely to experience mistreatment in a health care setting, or feel that a health care provider doesn’t listen to or believe them when they explain their symptoms or pain level.
Support that enables moms and newborns to thrive
Experts agree that most maternal deaths are preventable, pointing to the need for community support for Black patients in particular before, during and after birth.
“One of the things that stood out for us is that 90% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable,” says Nailah Johnson, director of the Texas Home Visiting Program at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. “Our goal is to share and understand these disparities and inequities and work with our partners in the community to provide the services and resources that families in North Texas need to thrive.”
The Doorways to Health program leverages resources and programming from several local community organizations to maximize quality and access to maternal health care for local families, specifically with a goal of improving the maternal health outcomes of Black women in Dallas.
The program connects pregnant women with a variety of supportive services, including:
- Postpartum care. United Way partner Delighted to Doula offers anti-bias-based, judgment-free education and support to mothers, enabling them to process the many emotions that come with pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. Services include a full year of at-home visits, 24/7 access to the care team via phone, text or email, baby care education, breastfeeding support and a variety of other tools and resources for each mom’s recovery. By working with families through the critical “fourth trimester,” the organization helps reduce instances of maternal mortality.
- Holistic maternal health care services. Each year, Abide Women’s Health Services provides hundreds of women in southern Dallas — especially Black, Indigenous, and women of color — with specialized care that addresses high instances of maternal mortality and morbidity. These services include prenatal and postnatal care, childbirth education, lactation support, ultrasounds, postpartum doula services, material support, and physical and mental health assessments.
- Free United Way-affiliated services such as Help Me Grow North Texas, which connects families to a network of child development resources, and Once Upon a Month, which provides free monthly children’s books to local families.
As the parent company of essential brands like Huggies and Kotex, Kimberly-Clark, through its foundation, invests in maternal and child health programs around the globe. The company partnered with United Way of Metropolitan Dallas on the Doorways to Health initiative to ensure more North Texas moms and babies receive quality care.
“The Black maternal health crisis requires immediate action and community-wide involvement,” says Cindy Masters, manager of Social Responsibility and Community Engagement at the Kimberly-Clark Foundation. “At Kimberly-Clark, we look for every opportunity to advocate for our consumers, and that includes working to improve health outcomes for pregnant women.”
The Kimberly-Clark Foundation leads a variety of initiatives focused on maternal health. In addition to the Doorways to Health partnership, the company has partnered with UNICEF for more than 20 years to strengthen the health of mothers and their children in 26 countries. In 2023, the Kimberly-Clark Foundation also launched a North Texas maternal health grant program, awarding grants to five nonprofit organizations that support women during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
“We’re proud to support Doorways to Health as part of our focus on maternal health,” Masters says. “Dallas is our home, and as the rates of maternal mortality have increased, we want to make a meaningful difference in our own backyard.”
A local mom’s story
Lasean was pregnant with her first child when she discovered Abide Women’s Health Services, a partner of Doorways to Health that offers culturally informed prenatal and postnatal care.
“I was terrified of hospitals, because of all the disparities and the horror stories that you hear about women of color,” Lasean shares. “So I Googled ‘prenatal care POC [people of color] near me’ and that’s how Abide showed up on my radar.”
Lasean says the first time she visited Abide, she immediately felt comfortable and safe.
“I felt confident in a place where I could just be a pregnant person of color,” she says. “[My doula] understood my preferences and my natural birth plan, and she supported everything that I wanted to do. Being around women who look like you, who have done the things you’ve done…[it] boosted my confidence that I could actually be a mom.”
Unfortunately, Lasean suffered through a harrowing birth experience that illustrates the challenges many Black pregnant women face. She had planned to deliver her baby at a Dallas-area birthing center, but things quickly went off course once she started feeling contractions earlier than expected and rushed with her partner to the center. Although she was in labor, the doctor told her to go home and return when she was further along. On her way home, she and her partner became stuck in traffic for an hour.
“Within 30 minutes of getting home, I had my baby in the bathtub,” she says. “With no medical supervision — nothing. It blows my mind to this day. Luckily there were no complications. But the flipside to that trauma is that anything could have happened to us.”
Lasean’s experience is a stark reminder of how traditional health care providers can so easily discount the needs of moms of color, which can lead to dangerous, and even deadly, consequences.
A united effort to improve Black maternal health
As part of its mission to improve access to education, income and health, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas works to improve maternal health outcomes for women of color.
The nonprofit’s Strong Start team consists of early childhood professionals who design, develop and implement program services. The team coordinates efforts with more than 40 community partners, impacting more than 40,000 North Texas families each year.
United Way also leads advocacy efforts for expanded health care coverage to better protect mothers and their children. During the 2023 Texas Legislative session, United Way worked with more than 900 advocates and hundreds of partner agencies to convince lawmakers to expand Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum, instead of just two months. The bill passed, and the extended coverage went into effect in March 2024.
United Way invites all North Texans to support improved health care for Black women. To sign up for the nonprofit’s Advocacy Alerts, volunteer for an upcoming early education or health-related program, or invest in initiatives like Doorways to Health, visit unitedwaydallas.org.