The Omicron variant has fueled a dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases across the country and Southern California. The rising COVID-19 cases may prompt hospitals and clinics to reinforce visitor restrictions to control the spread.
These restrictions can inadvertently compromise the quality of care of all patients—but pose unique challenges for Latinx immigrants and their families.
Our educational system was unequal even before the pandemic. Those inequalities were exacerbated when students transitioned to learning from home.
Black, Latinx and Native American students suffered the most. Not only did they suddenly find themselves isolated from their schools and peers, but their families were disproportionately impacted by job losses, unequal access to health care and vulnerability to COVID-19.
The final installment of this five-part series about Los Angeles County’s unique Maternal Health Diversion Program explores the pressing need for LA’s Office of Diversion and Reentry to scale up its diversion capacity. Thus far, the money to do so hasn’t been there.
The Maternal Health Diversion program pulls pregnant people from the county’s women’s jail and places them in interim group housing until they’re ready to move into their own permanent housing with their children. All the while, participants receive a broad array of services.
In California, 34 jurisdictions have declared racism a public health crisis. Governor Newsom, unfortunately, has failed to do so at the state level, just as he failed to support broader investments supported by the legislature to advance health equity last year.
His inaction seems to be rooted in two issues: failure to prioritize racial equity and conflating investments in health care with investments in prevention and public health.
Across California, midwives and doulas are working to increase access to their services to more Black and brown women. Organizations are also raising awareness about the options people have to welcome a child into the world.
Some “women of color are unaware that there’s another way to be in your pregnancy, labor and birth, and postpartum than what’s generally done and prescribed,” said Laura Perez, who works in San Francisco. “You can’t have access to something if you don’t know it exists.”
Long before the point of lock-up, the moms now in a Los Angeles diversion program for pregnant incarcerated people said they experienced problems for which they might have gotten assistance — things like housing insecurity and homelessness, domestic violence, substance use disorder, and involvement with the child welfare system.
With the support of the Maternal Health Diversion Program, many of these women said they are now able to get the help they need.
In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will fund pilot projects that provide alternative responses to domestic violence. While cities and jurisdictions have launched similar efforts, California is the first state to support such experiments at scale.
“It’s the biggest investment in alternative responses that the state has ever seen,” said Cat Brooks, of Justice Teams Network.
My family’s history is deeply shaped by our nation’s history of discriminatory housing policies.
I’ve written about my grandfather’s story and about how redlining affected my family. But I never fully explored how this legacy continues to impact the housing situation of my family and many others. The legacy of redlining and housing discrimination has exacerbated California’s already devastating housing crisis for the Black community.
Although California has set high standards for controlling some chemicals in water, actual enforcement and removal of contaminants is generally slow, and frequently stymied by high treatment costs and antiquated water infrastructure.
Meanwhile, polluters rarely have to answer for the health impacts their actions may have caused. Low-income communities of color are particularly hard hit, due to decades of environmental racism.
California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, but unfettered groundwater pumping has caused the land to sink and the regional canal system to break.
If the agencies in charge of the canals don’t fix them, water deliveries will continue to be affected, impacting everyone from farm owners to low-wage farmworkers.