Medical Racism Is The Reason Black Women Are More Likely To Die During Childbirth

Black women still face health inequities when giving birth. The Associated Press spoke with medical professionals about obstacles Black Americans face when they seek healthcare. The project, which lasted for one year, investigated how racism shaped health disparities today. The racist roots of medical practices revealed a harsh reality – Black patients are not taken seriously and sometimes the result is catastrophic.

Sadly, the numbers don’t lie. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Black children were most likely to be born prematurely (14.8%) when compared to Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders (12.7%), American Indian/Alaska Native (12.3%), Hispanic (10.2%), White (9.5%), and Asian (9.2%). Black mothers were more than two times as likely to die in childbirth compared to their white counterparts in 2021, according to the CDC. While Black infants died at a rate of 10.4% compared to White infants (4.4%), for every 100,000 live births in 2020, according to the same federal data.

Angelica Lyons, a public health instructor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, contacted the university’s Hospital Labor and Delivery Unit when her stomach started hurting during her pregnancy. She recalled that her students said she “didn’t look good,” the Associated Press reported. Lyons’ pain was dismissed she recalled about a woman on the phone, “She made me feel like my concern wasn’t important, and because this was my first pregnancy, I decided not to go because I wasn’t sure and thought maybe I was overreacting.”

Dr. Laura Riley, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, told the Associated Press, “The way structural racism can play out in this particular disease is not being taken seriously.” Dr. Riley referred to maternal sepsis, a major source of maternal mortality – which Black women are two times as likely to develop than white women. She added, “We know that delay in diagnosis is what leads to these really bad outcomes.”

The Biden-Harris administration focuses on the state of maternal health in the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis. President Joe Biden has also designated $471 million to support the Blueprint. According to a White House briefing, the amount also, “requires all States to provide continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum.”