The Economic Body Series
The Cost of Childcare
A workforce that depends on women returning to work.
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
|
|
Let me tell you about the appointment that does not happen.
She is six weeks out from a delivery that nearly took her — the blood pressure that would not come down, the days on magnesium, the incision that is, if you look at it the way a surgeon looks at it, still a healing wound. Her six-week visit is the highest-yield hour in the entire year of her care. It is where I catch the hypertension before it strokes her, order the glucose test that tells us whether her gestational diabetes became the permanent kind, screen for the depression she will not bring up on her own. And she cancels it. Not because she does not understand that it matters. She cancels because there is no one to watch her toddler, the daycare down the road closed in the fall, and the one still open costs more a month than her rent. Ten weeks later I see her again — in the emergency department, in crisis.
I want to say this as plainly as I know how, because almost no one in my field will say it as a clinical fact: the cost of childcare is a maternal-health problem. Not a lifestyle problem. Not a budgeting problem. A determinant of who recovers and who bleeds.
|
The bill for the childcare we would not fund gets paid in her blood pressure.
|
|
|
Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs it.
— YC
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH · Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
|
