Racial-Ethnic Configuration of Parent Dyads and Premature Births in the Utah Population Database

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Abstract

As children are increasingly more likely to have parents of different races or ethnicities, it is important to ask how the racial ethnic status of both parents, and their combined racial-ethnic configuration, influences the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in ways that matter for birth outcomes such as prematurity. The changing demographics of childbearing, in which interracial parent couples who encompass increasing and increasingly diverse shares of the US population, make new approaches to analyzing the impact of race upon birth outcomes essential. In this paper we seek to explore a poorly understood feature of the increasingly interracial quality of parenting in the US – the implications of interracial parent configurations for birth outcomes, especially interracial couple contexts which extend beyond binary considerations black-white configurations. A focus upon interracial couple context allows for consideration of the parental couple as a social unit subject to discrimination and racial biases which influence social stress and risk factors associated with preterm birth. In a logistic regression analysis of the predictors of pre-term birth in a 25-year time series of data from the Utah Population Database, we find that not all interracial combinations result in heightened risk of prematurity in comparison to same race couples. In particular, both white fathers and black fathers in interracial parent couples increased the odds of pre-term birth. On the other hand, Asian and Pacific Islander fathers within mixed race parent couples actually reduce the risks of
preterm birth. We discuss these results in light of the changing demographics of childbearing in the U.S. and theorizing on couple-oriented perspectives on race and racism.

Authors

• Kim M. Korinek, University of Utah

• Zobayer Ahmmad, University of Utah