“Maternal Health” and “Reproductive Health” in North Carolina

My inbox gets jammed with various health-related educational opportunities.

For instance, the North Carolina Medical Journal this month dedicated its issue to the field of Maternal Health. This is a division of public health that focuses on health care for pregnant women to assure that the mother and the baby both thrive.

Meanwhile, the Mountain Area Health Education Center in Asheville– one of several publicly funded continuing education vehicles throughout the state mostly for ancillary health care professionals– is sponsoring a “learning collaborative” on Maternal Health/ Well-Woman care. The term “Reproductive Health” is also applied to this effort suggesting that it will focus, at least to some extent, on abortion and contraception.

Interestingly, we expend all of this time and effort and money on prenatal care– and describe it as very important– at the same time that abortion WILLFULLY takes unborn human lives; and the heavily promoted Covid vaccines cause miscarriages and infertility.

We say that we want healthy mothers and babies, but then do awful things to undermine them.

The NC Values Coalition says that North Carolina ranks #1 in the nation for the increase in abortions– 37%!— since the Dobbs decision last year. And yet, key Republicans in Raleigh are floating a 13 week ban with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life (or health) of the mother. The problem is that a 13 week ban will not prevent many abortions because the vast majority already occur within 13 weeks. Not many lives would be saved.

In North Carolina, our public health infrastructure pays lip service to Maternal and Child Health, but then the system overall brazenly promotes abortion and the Covid vaccines, both of which harm unborn human life. And this harm must be regarded as deliberate.

Our GOP legislators need to improve on this state of affairs. The artifice described above is astonishing; but the large number of human lives taken is truly tragic.