Mama Might Be Better Off Dead Summary

In the US, black women are over three times more likely to die from maternally related complications than white women, and their babies are less likely to survive their first year (Oparah & Bonparte, 2015). Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth, edited by Julia Chineyere Oparah and Alicia D. Bonaparte tells the stories, experiences, oppression, and subjection of black women in the maternal health care system. Each chapter in the book explained a certain key point in the experience of black women and the health care system. In the following, I will discuss how the medical industrial complex or the introduction of medical treatments has not only stripped women of color, trans women, poor and immigrant women of their autonomy, but has sustained the hierarchy of patriarchy in the health system.

In the book, Mama Might Be Better off Dead, there were two main characters that were crucial to the plot of the story, Jackie Banes and Mrs. Jackson. Throughout the book, I found Mrs. Jackson to have the best connection with public health. Mrs. Jackson was an elderly and disabled women with a variety of health care odds stacked against her. She had numerous health concerns; such as, diabetes, peripheral vascular disease, and an amputated limb (Abraham, 1993). Mrs. Jackson suffered these health issues because she was a poverty stricken women and experienced economically depressed living conditions. Due to her low socio-economic status, Mrs. Jackson did not qualify for full coverage Medicaid because she was not considered in a low enough income bracket unless she put more than half of her monthly social security towards health benefits (Abraham, 1993). As a woman with limited resources, Mrs. Jackson was unable to afford the cost of benefits much less her own survival expenses. The duration that Mrs. Jackson experienced insufficient resources led her to all of her unfortunate outcomes regarding her health. One of the reasons Mrs. Jackson needed an amputation on her leg was due to an untreated wound that resulted from her diabetes. Her diabetes had also gone untreated because she was unable to afford treatment and transportation costs to help her infection heal (Abraham, 1993). In the book, no one cared about Mrs. Jackson and it was because she was a poor

Today, one of the leading problems discussed in politics is healthcare. America constantly struggles with their healthcare system to make it affordable and accessible to communities. In the twentieth century this same problem also existed, creating one of the most well-known African American activist groups in America. In the book Body and Soul by Alondra Nelson, it discusses the social inequalities of the healthcare system in America and how the Black Panther Party fought against medical discrimination for African Americans. Nelson talks about how the Black Panther Party went from the role of protecting black citizens to a larger political role in African American health care. The significance of this book applies to medical sociology in many ways and is essential to the understanding of providing better healthcare to future generations. In the following book review, it includes a summary of each chapter to highlight the main points, some of the very many medical sociology concepts that could be applied, and lastly an evaluation of the book as a whole and its significance to our course.

In the book “mama might be better off dead” written by Laurie Kaye Abraham, tells a story of Jackie Banes and her family, and their struggles to hold the family’s health together. Her grandmother Mrs. Cora Jackson, who pretty much raised her, has suffered the amputation of one leg because of uncontrolled diabetes. Jackie’s father, Tommy, who has suffered a stroke because he didn’t care about the consequences of high blood pressure. Jackie’s husband, Robert, who has a progressive kidney disease. Abraham has gone out of her way to find more about the American health care system in North Lawndale, Illinois. Throughout the book she talks about how the health care system in America is so unfair and unsatisfactory to the needs of poor people such as the Banes’s Family.

“Mama Might Be Better off Dead: the Failure of Health Care in Urban America” by Laurie Kaye Abraham, follows a families struggles over the course of three years in a poor Chicago neighborhood. Abraham points out specifically how the health care system in the United States has failed the different members of the poverty stricken Banes family. The main character, Jackie has the responsibility of taking care of her sick and elderly grandmother. Jackie also cares for her three young children with little help from her husband, Robert who also suffers from various illnesses. While, there are some government programs set up to help families like the Banes’, the health care system is certainly lacking.

This moving chronicle of one family coping with violence, teenage pregnancy, and school failure mirrors the struggles of families in

Throughout the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, many of those who lived in poor conditions died because they didn’t have access to proper health care. In the beginning, it’s shown that Jane’s poverty-stricken parents died after being sick, and the same happened to Jane’s childhood friend Helen after a typhus outbreak at their school. In both of those situations they were too poor to receive the medical care that they needed. This problem still exists in modern times, except it involves not only the poor, but also the elderly and disabled. In the 1960s the Medicare and Medicaid programs were put into place to try to help those that can’t afford health insurance. However, not everyone is eligible for those programs, so they still lack

Widening economic inequality in the United States is being accompanied by increasing health care disparity. While the health care system seeks to provide health care as a human right, it fails to do so often worsening the disparities (Dickman, Himmelstein, & Woolhandler, 2017). While health care today has made major strides, there are many people who are still suffering from health care system injustices. Of the people who are still uninsured a majority of them are in the middle-working class or those living in poverty. Poor Americans have less access to health care than wealthy Americans. The life expectancy gap between the rich and poor continues to widen. Health care in poor communities is too often neglected. This issue has been a trend in the United States for many years. In Abraham’s book, Mama might be better off dead these very same inequalities are evident for the Banes family. Because of these inequalities, preventive illness becomes life threatening causing care to then become extensive and even more expensive.

Facing transitions and dealing with dramatic change has a influencing aspect on family and personal relationships, through the text we see the dynamics of relationships and roles of family shift to meet the needs of each individual as they face the challenge of moving in to the world before them. the manner in which the various members of the Brennan family relate to each other, as well as the horrible

The health of a nation plays an integral part in the overall success and economic well being of a particular country. The United Stated, while pouring more money into the healthcare system than any other country, still stands as a broken system with inadequate care for many citizens. One of the most marginalized groups of people, African American women, continually score alarmingly low on basic measures of overall health. The healthcare discrepancies between white and black women in the United States are alarming, and they reveal flaws in the American health care system as a whole.

Kozol begins the book by providing a backdrop of where he met many of the families, in the welfare hotel Martinique Hotel in December 1985. The Martinique Hotel was initially advertised as a temporary living facility, or a shelter, where “1400 children and about 400 of their parents struggled to prevail” (Kozol, pg 3). Families in these welfare hotels fell prey to the corrupt Koch administration that “took advantage of Federal emergency housing funds to put them up in hotels” after demolishing other low-income homes (Anonymous, 1989). In the Martinique he illustrates the inhumanities that occurred on a daily basis such as robberies, sex trafficking, substance use and the described the decrepit living conditions where the residents resided. Kozol identifies a family, Pietro Locatello, whom sought shelter at the Martinique. Although Pietro tries his hardest to provide safety and inclusiveness in his small one bedroom hotel room he is unable to save his son, Christopher, from the allure of, what begins as pan-handling for change, to potentially being sex trafficked and involvement lifelong

In the book, Gang Leader for a Day, a rogue sociologist passionately dives into the lives of one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects in an attempt to develop an insight as to how the urban impoverished lived. Throughout the text it becomes clear that a conflict paradigm is being reflected. A conflict society is based on social inequality, in which some individuals benefit and thrive more than others, which tends to lead to conflict and thus change. This is evident both in the housing projects where a gang known as the “Black Kings” take over and also in the surrounding neighborhoods where the more elite citizens, including persons from the authors university, shy away from associating with the nearby poor black nearby public, thus

Imagine your own family member constantly manipulating you into thinking you were going to be forever young. Now imagine that person telling every individual that you cannot care for yourself nor will ever get better. To be completely honest, that is a scary thought, not having any control over your own body and believing your caretaker that you are mentally incapacitate to care for yourself. The documentary I chose to watch and write about is Mommy Dead & Dearest, this documentary was released 11 March 2017 and the director is Erin Lee Carr. In this documentary, we see Dee Dee and Gypsy’s narrative who brings Munchausen Syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse that involves a caretaker making up an illness for

Even though it’s not, “Dead Mums Don’t Cry” was like a human story from a previous century. The title hints a sad story, but it was far worse than I would imagine. It’s hard to believe those people are living in the same decade with the rest of us in the world. Their living condition is simplify so poor. The film focuses on material mortality and childbirth issues in Chad, and it compares the condition in Honduras. It shows how pregnant women, family and medial worker struggle to save the lives without the basic resources, supplies and tools. There are not enough functioning facilities near the villages, and there are no essential medical supplies and medicines needed to save lives in Chad.

How do people view the health care system in practice? Where does the failure of inadequate care lie in the hands of the individual or the health care provider? Laurie Abraham explores this topic in Mama Might Be Better Off Dead to discuss where health care fails within an urban area of the United States. Following the Banes family over three years, Abraham’s ethnography delves into the intricate system of health care the Banes family navigates (Abraham, ).