Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday highlighted the importance of investing in maternal health initiatives aimed at supporting mothers before and after they give birth.
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Sanders, who has three children, said she raised alarm bells about maternal health in Arkansas after she became governor because the state consistently ranked among the worst in maternal mortality rates.
“If we can see these women and help them and support them from the very beginning of their pregnancy all the way through, then we can help address some of these problems and we can change maternal health,” Sanders, a Republican, told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview alongside Moore, a Democrat, and philanthropist Olivia Walton, which aired Sunday. “Not just in our state, but across the country.”
Sanders said she convened a strategic working group to identify ways to improve maternal health outcomes throughout the state and was “pleasantly shocked by how many people showed up.”
“People that I know actively campaigned against me were some of the most helpful people in developing our strategic plan on how we were going to address this problem in Arkansas,” the governor added. “It is something that breaks down a lot of walls. Everybody knows a mom. Everybody has a mom.”
The working group led Sanders to introduce the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act and other initiatives, including the Proactive Postpartum Call Center run through the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which calls women in their first six weeks postpartum to ask and answer questions about physical and mental health.
Walton, the founder of Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, highlighted the need to focus on postpartum care just as much as prenatal services.
“We’ve got to start doing postpartum care because we don’t really do it in America,” she said. “In the postpartum space … it’s a continuum. And I firmly believe this, because two-thirds of maternal mortality happens after the baby is born, after mom has left the hospital. Forty percent of moms don’t go back for any checkup.”
“Sixty percent of Medicaid moms don’t go back for any checkup,” Walton added. “The gold standard here is home visits by a nurse within the first two weeks. There are pockets of that happening around the country. Gov. Sanders has an incredible solution in Arkansas with the postpartum call center.”
Moore highlighted an initiative in Maryland called the Bridge Program, which seeks to provide low-income mothers with direct monetary assistance.
“It is something that’s going to focus on providing cash assistance to mothers who are both prenatal and then postnatal mothers,” the Maryland governor said. “To be able to provide cash assistance for them to be able to have additional measurements of support. It’s going to happen for 150 families in the areas of Maryland that you’ve had concentrated poverty being a long-term challenge.”
He added that better maternal care can also help curb childhood poverty.
“And so we know that if you want to better help children and address the issue of childhood poverty, it means support their families and support their moms. And so maternal health becomes a huge part of all this,” Moore said.
The two governors, who are in opposing political parties, also spoke about how their views on abortion impact how they approach issues of maternal health.
“I’m unapologetically pro-life. I think that we have to protect life at every stage, at every level,” Sanders said, adding: “I’m proud that Arkansas is one of the most pro-life states in the country. I want to continue to elevate that. But so often we stop the conversation after the baby is born, and I think that it can’t just be if we’re pro-life. We have to be whole-life.”
Moore agreed with Sanders on the need to support services for children like adoption and foster care, but added, “I do respectfully disagree on the Roe v. Wade decision.”
“I think this was something that was law of the land literally for decades that was about how are we making sure that women have a choice, and how are we making sure that women are the ones who are the driving deciders as to what happens with their health care,” the Maryland governor said, noting he supported Marylanders enshrining the right to abortion access in the state constitution last year.
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