As a black woman, one of the most frustrating things about being a Democrat is when members of your own party suggest that we’d win more if we stop focusing on identity politics and social issues and start focusing on jobs and the economy. This is a false dichotomy since these issues are very much intertwined. It’s also maddening because it demonstrates how many people fail to understand just how deeply racism and white supremacy impact opportunities, health and wellness and quality of life for people of color.
One of the most glaring examples of this is the maternal mortality rate among black women in the United States. Overall, we have the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world and the majority of these deaths are preventable. But for black women, the rate is simply astonishing. Black women are 300 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white women. Yes, you read that right—300 percent. Black mothers in this country die three to four times more than white mothers. NPR and ProPublica teamed up to do a series of stories on maternal care and preventable deaths. And they discovered that education and income made no difference when it comes to protecting black women from dying during pregnancy and childbirth.
The disproportionate toll on African Americans is the main reason the U.S. maternal mortality rate is so much higher than that of other affluent countries. Black expectant and new mothers in the U.S. die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan, the World Health Organization estimates. [...]
A 2016 analysis of five years of data [in New York City] found that black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.
While there are numerous arguments about why this incredible disparity exists, many researchers who study medicine and social science agree that it’s attributable to systemic racism. Some of the issues are easy to pinpoint—poor nutrition due to lack of access to healthy food, chronic health conditions, lack of health insurance. All of these are social inequities that are well documented. But even black women’s experiences with the medical field are reflections of the historical and current racism in this country.
The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.
Those problems are amplified by unconscious biases that are embedded throughout the medical system, affecting quality of care in stark and subtle ways. In the more than 200 stories of African-American mothers that ProPublica and NPR have collected over the past year, the feeling of being devalued and disrespected by medical providers was a constant theme. [...]
Over and over, black women told of medical providers who equated being African American with being poor, uneducated, noncompliant and unworthy.
When medical providers have these kinds of biases, it leads to black pregnant and new mothers being misdiagnosed, victim blamed and their treatment mismanaged. And sadly, there is a dearth of black doctors and nurses who can relate to these women and understand all the stressors and discrimination that can impact their pregnancies and childbirth. Researchers also note how stress (and in this case they refer to the chronic stress of being a black woman in society) plays a “weathering” effect on the body—wearing it down over time and causing it to become susceptible to infections and diseases, like diabetes and high blood pressure. This stress causes cells to age faster than normal. In fact, one study proved that black women ages 40-60, on average, had markers of aging that were 7 ½ years older than whites.
Weathering can have particularly serious repercussions in pregnancy and childbirth, the most physiologically complex time in a woman’s life. Stress has been linked to one of the most common and consequential pregnancy complications, preterm birth. Black women are 48 percent more likely than whites to deliver prematurely (and, closely related, black infants are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday). Here again, income and education aren’t protective.
Numbers and data can only do but so much to convey the seriousness of this health disparity. Instead, we can learn much by putting a human face on this issue. Shalon Irving was a 36-year-old epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service. Irving’s life’s work was researching how people’s health outcomes were linked to structural inequality. She became pregnant unexpectedly and died soon after giving birth. She had numerous risk factors that doctor’s should have been monitoring—a blood clotting disorder, weight issues, a history of high blood pressure, stress from a break up with her boyfriend. Yet, each time she went to the doctor or hospital, she was released—after being told her symptoms (a mass on her incision from her C-section, pain, and high blood pressure) were fine and treatable. Right before she died, she continued to tell her mother that she didn’t feel well. She died from complications from high blood pressure. She left behind a three-week-old daughter.
Four academic degrees (including a dual-subject Ph.D.), a career in public health and extensive knowledge of health inequalities couldn’t save Shalon from dying from childbirth complications. This is a fact worth noting because many people think that education and a good job is some kind of magical shield from racism. This is akin to the aforementioned idea some Democrats have that if we just concentrate on economics, social issues for the marginalized in society will somehow disappear. Maternal mortality is a health crisis for black women. The rates have been high for decades and are rising in some places. Systemic racism is a vicious cycle. In this instance, not only does it impact black mothers and their families, it also means that their daughters may be impacted as well. We can’t afford to believe that identity politics are unimportant when so many lives are at stake.