The Black Lives Matter movement has spawned a hugely critical companion movement, called
Black Mamas Matter.
"I was hurting so bad I didn't know what to do with myself," remembers Tiffany, who was forced to labor for hours in a basement hallway of the public hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, where she had sought maternity care. Despite her sister's pleas for the nurses' attention, Tiffany was completely ignored until the baby started to crown. ...
Aaliyah's doctor at the public hospital neglected routine prenatal care, and as a result her baby spent three weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. LaKeisha developed a serious infection following her C-section due to inadequate follow-up care. When Kayla gave birth to a baby with several malformations to the hands and feet, doctors refused to let her hold her daughter and instead interrogated her about suspected drug use.
Such lapses in quality maternal care are all-too-familiar experiences for many women of color. Nationwide, black families are nearly four times more likely to face the loss of a new mother than white families and black women are twice as likely to suffer severe pregnancy complications such as heart attack, shock, blood clot, or hysterectomy.
It's not just the criminal justice system killing black people. Discrimination is endemic to plenty of systems in our society, the healthcare system among them but particularly in maternal and child health. That's why more than 20 experts working on maternal health met this summer in Atlanta, beginning the Black Mamas Matter movement. They are working to highlight the fact that there are counties in the deep south that have a higher rate of maternal death in childbirth than parts of sub-Saharan Africa. That in Atlanta, a city with some world-class health facilities, "African American women die in childbirth at a rate more than three times the national average."
This is fundamentally a systemic, society-wide problem. But right now it's also a political one. There are two ongoing political battles that directly affect the health of African-American women—the refusal of almost all of the southern states to refuse Medicaid expansion and the renewed effort to shutdown Planned Parenthood. Both of these political fights are trying to limit what matters most to all women's health—sex education, contraception, abortion, and prenatal care—but disproportionately black women living in the south. The sickening state of black maternal health in the country should be a centerpiece in these ongoing fights.
Black lives most definitely matter, beginning with the ones who create them.