Preemies, Poverty, Race and Policy

This paper will be based on follow-up to an earlier research project. I was part of a research team that engaged in participant-observation and conducted hundreds of formal and informal interviews with African American women who had given birth prematurely. We immersed ourselves in the lives of our subjects, following them to doctor appointments, home visits from therapists and visits to preschool facilities.  We also accompanied these women as they negotiated a complex and racialized bureaucracy including the family court and the criminal justice systems while conducting their day-to-day affairs. Race, class and reproduction have remained, for them, inexorably linked. Many of these women had to make serious choices pertaining to the care and treatment of their newborns under conditions of abject poverty and structural racism and on occasion they lost custody of their children.  My goal is to see how the particular women I worked with have fared since I last contacted them. Of particular interest is how their children, particularly those who were born prematurely, are faring and how any children born subsequent to our initial study are faring. Have the preemies caught up with their non-preemie peers developmentally?  How many are in mainstream classrooms?  How many need additional help?  Have siblings born after them been premature or full-term? Have any of the mothers terminated subsequent pregnancies? Have mothers who have lost custody regained control of their children?  Are families continuing to face housing and employment challenges in the aftermath of the economic debacle of 2008?