Racism as a Root Cause of Disparity
Between 2021 and 2023, NBCDI and Stanford’s RAPID Survey Project gathered striking data showing how racism directly affects health outcomes during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum recovery. Nearly 1 in 5 Black parents reported experiencing racism in perinatal care—a number staggeringly higher than the 0.5% reported by white parents.
These aren’t abstract statistics. They represent lived experiences: being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or treated with suspicion and condescension. As one parent shared, after her providers realized her baby was biracial, “my level of care changed significantly.”
This distrust, fear, and trauma are not incidental—they are systemic.
Generational Inequity and Biological Harm
Due to intergenerational income inequality and structural racism, Black families are overrepresented among those living below 200% of the federal poverty line. And poverty itself is linked to poorer health outcomes.
But the effects of racism go deeper than social conditions. They are biologically embedded.
Research confirms that racial trauma elevates stress hormones, leading to inflammation and physiological changes that increase the risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and postpartum complications. These outcomes are not due to race—but to the stress of experiencing racism.
NBCDI’s Black Infant and Maternal Health Task Force is working to address these issues, calling for both community-centered research and systemic change.
How Chinese Medicine Can Support Healing
While policy and systemic change are urgently needed, individuals deserve care right now—care that recognizes the lived experiences of Black birthing people and provides safe, culturally respectful, and body-centered healing. This is where Chinese medicine can offer support.
Chinese medicine has long understood the relationship between trauma, energy, and physical health. It honors the ways the body holds emotion, and how healing must happen at every level: physical, emotional, and ancestral.
Here’s how Chinese medicine can help:
✧ Rebuilding Vitality After Birth
Postpartum recovery is seen as a sacred window in Chinese medicine. Specific acupuncture points and herbal formulas can help nourish the blood, strengthen the qi, and support the organs after the profound effort of labor and delivery—especially when compounded by stress, medical trauma, or inadequate care.
✧ Calming the Nervous System
Acupuncture helps regulate the nervous system, lowering stress hormones like cortisol and supporting the body’s parasympathetic (“rest and restore”) response. This can be particularly helpful for racial trauma, birth trauma, and postpartum anxiety or insomnia.
✧ Supporting Grief, Anger & Intergenerational Healing
Chinese medicine recognizes the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health. In the clinic, we hold space for anger, grief, and exhaustion—and support the release of what has been held too long. Treatments may focus on the Liver (anger), Lungs (grief), and Heart (spirit), guiding these emotions through rather than burying them.
✧ Community & Cultural Sovereignty
At its core, Chinese medicine is about relationship—to body, to cycle, to lineage, to the Earth. While it is not a substitute for culturally specific care, it can be offered in solidarity with Black-led perinatal health initiatives—amplifying their work and helping restore balance and resilience in the nervous and reproductive systems.
Toward Collective Liberation
As NBCDI reminds us, “Black maternal and infant health disparities are a public health crisis that demand immediate action.” This Black History Month, we stand in solidarity with Black families fighting for equity, justice, and a future where every child is born into care—not harm.
At Lotus Leaf Health & Wellness, I am committed to providing trauma-informed, body-centered support that honors the lived realities of racism while working toward repair. Chinese medicine may not dismantle systems—but it can be part of how we soothe the nervous system, restore vitality, and reclaim the sacredness of birth.
Let us honor not just Black history—but Black futures. Let us imagine, and build, a world where every parent and baby is held with respect, safety, and dignity.
