“Wanna Dismantle Medical Racism and the Black Maternal Crisis?: Listen to Black Women”

In 2018, as I was leaving my hotel in Iowa, I picked up the USA Today. On the front page was a story about the black maternal crisis. I was floored, were Americans finally beginning to recognized the tragedy of medical racism affecting black mamas and birthing people? For decades reproductive justice activists like Loretta Ross (helped coin “reproductive justice), Lynn Roberts (mama/activist/scholar), and Linda Goler Blount (Black Women’s Health Initiative) had been sounding the alarm about how damaging medical racism is for black women and birthing people and it seemed only black people were listening. Within the past three years, it seems more folks outside of the reproductive and birthing justice worlds are paying attention to what’s happening to black pregnant people. Journalists, pundits, politicians, and scholars are now realizing that medical racism is indeed a public health crisis. The United States is the most dangerous place for a black person to give birth compared to other more economically developed nations. But why, y’all?

In slavery, the wealth of the slave owner was not only tied to land but to an enslaved woman’s womb. If an enslaved woman gave birth to a child, the owner’s wealth increased. By the 19th century, American doctors and surgeons began to advance medical branches, surgical techniques, and even medical instruments to preserve black women’s reproductive health. Lest we think they did so because they were compassionate, they worked to maintain womb health because in U.S. slavery, a slave’s status was passed through the mother. British colonial lawmakers created this law, “partus sequitur ventrem” in the 18th century to protect their wealth. Since colonial times, black women’s medical treatment was governed and maintained by anti-black racism and economic exploitation. So what happened to them in freedom?

In freedom, black women’s reproduction was now considered an economic liability to white Americans. White Americans demonized single black mothers by labeling them as irresponsible breeders, welfare queens, and promiscuous baby mamas. Doctors, nurses and hospitals that were supposed to care for all women and birthing people, treated black patients differently than white patients. They believed racial fictions about black people that claimed African Americans did not experience pain, had thicker blood, were more promiscuous, were more superstitious . . . the fictions seem to go on. In the process, black women and their babies suffered complications, illness, and death. So how do we change a field and system that is centuries old? I have some thoughts . . .

#1 Stop raising children who are anti-black, sexist, and classist. Period(t). These children enter medical schools, nursing schools, patient rooms filled with biases that are harmful to black lives.

#2 Support black women-led non-profits dedicated to reproductive and birthing justice. See my resources page for a list of organizations.

#3 If you have a primary care physician, ask them to check your cortisol and C reactive protein levels. You want to do this because African American women have consistently been found to have higher rates of "low-level inflammation." This inflammation is directly tied to the amount of stress we endure. When all outlying factors are the same with other groups of women such as income, educational levels, romantic partnership status, etc. Black women's constant exposure to racism causes our bodies to suffer internal inflammation.

#4 Petition hospitals to hire independent patient navigators, as independent contract workers, to act as advocates for black and poor maternal patients.

You tear down a faulty foundation one brick at a time.

 Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens