Reznet

Native Mom's Story Shows Need for Health Reform

By Kevin Abourezk

Leah Long Visitor wants the world to know her baby wasn't born dead.

"He was still alive," the 28-year-old Oglala Sioux said. "He was still breathing."

Just before midnight on Dec. 4, 2008, she gave birth to her fourth child, Emmid Dreaming Bear, in an Indian Health Services hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D. Long Visitor was not quite 20 weeks along in her pregnancy.

For about 20 minutes, Long Visitor and her baby's father, Walt Dreaming Bear, held their child until he died. Long Visitor said she couldn't understand why the doctor and nurse working that night at the hospital didn't even try to help her son.

An obituary in the Rapid City Journal a few days later said Emmid Dreaming Bear had been stillborn.

For Long Visitor, it was salt in a wound that had not even begun to heal.

"I didn't like it too much because he wasn't stillborn," she said. "He was alive. He was with us for a while."

Hers is a story not uncommon in Indian Country, where the infant mortality rate for Native people is 150 percent greater than for white infants. Where federal funding for Indian health care — promised to tribes in exchange for 400 million acres of land — is less than half of that for a federal prisoner.

"For proud nations of people who fought valiantly, sacrificed their freedom and negotiated honestly for a few considerations, like health care for their people, in exchange for their land and their lives — surely Congress can do better," the National Indian Health Board said in testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in August 2007.

For perhaps the first time in 16 years, Congress is poised to reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, the primary legislation that provides health care to Native people. Congress has debated reauthorization proposals for the last five years, but year after year has left the bill languishing like an Indian patient in an Indian Health Service waiting room.

Last year, the Senate passed the IHCIA, but it later died in the U.S. House of Representatives after Republicans took aim at provisions in the bill that provided funding for abortions.

With a strong Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president in office, many consider passage of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act imminent this year.

The effort to get the bill passed began last week when Native health advocates spoke before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee about the need for reauthorization of the act. Those advocates expect Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to introduce the bill by the end of March.

For Long Visitor and her lost son, the act's promises of improved and expanded Indian health care come too little too late.

While she received some prenatal care, she was never told to stay in bed in order to maintain her pregnancy, she said. And she questions whether hospital staff could have fought a little harder for her son. But she admits it was a difficult pregnancy from the beginning.

More than anything, she wonders why her son's obituary said he was born without a heartbeat. That he never inhaled a single breath.

That he never got to enjoy the warmth of his parents' arms.

"We got to hold him and everything. He was still alive."

This year as the Senate and House of Representatives take up debate on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, I and other Reznetnews.org reporters will be writing stories about Indian health care.

If you would like to share your experience in an Indian Health Service hospital or clinic, please contact me at the link below.

[Editor's note: The author and Leah Long Visitor are first cousins.]

Kevin Abourezk's "Red Clout" columns are available for syndication. Please contact reznet to purchase republishing rights.

Kevin Abourezk, Rosebud Lakota, is a reporter and editor at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star. He writes reznet's "Red Clout" political blog and teaches reporting at the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute. Abourezk was awarded a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in 2006.

To send Kevin Abourezk a message please click here