We can make birth safer for Black mothers. Here's how.
Over the last 30 years, nearly every wealthy country in the world has made it much safer for people to have babies. Only one outlier has moved in the opposite direction: the United States, where the rate of people dying in childbirth continues, stubbornly and tragically, to rise. In 2021, 1,205 US women died from birth-related causes, up from 754 in 2019. Many of those deaths — a full 89 percent in one Georgia study — are potentially preventable with the proper care.
Black people who give birth are at especially high risk. Nationwide, the maternal mortality rate for Black women is 2.6 times the rate for white women. Some regions have even bigger disparities: In Chicago, the rate for Black women is almost 6 times the rate for white women; in New York City, it’s 9 times.
The causes are big societal problems: failing hospitals (or no hospitals at all), lack of access to affordable health care, and doctors and nurses who dismiss Black women’s pain. These issues may seem intractable, but activists, clinicians, and scholars around the country are already working on solutions: ensuring access to Black doctors and nurses, creating new models of prenatal care that give Black patients a bigger support system, and expanding Medicaid to make sure patients can get care from preconception to postpartum.
Karie Stewart, for example, started Melanated Group Midwifery Care three years ago to provide prenatal and postpartum care “for Black people, by Black people.” As a labor and delivery nurse in Chicago, Stewart said that she always noticed that Black patients were treated differently. “Their care was not even close to what their counterparts were getting,” she said.
To help combat those inequalities — and the dangers birthing people and babies can face when they get substandard care — Melanated Group connects each patient with a Black midwife, doula, nurse, and social worker. Together, they make sure that no matter what issues come up during or after pregnancy, patients always have someone to reach out to — someone who will actually listen to their concerns.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24092448/black-mothers-maternal-mortality-crisis-solutions
I applaud this, wholeheartedly. However, we should be making childbirth safer for all mothers while doing this at the same time. The first instance of a death in childbirth that I knew was a white mother, not well off, married to a Black man and having her fifth baby. It seems to me that poverty may be the common thread here. Or maybe it was the Black father, in her case....
