Black mothers in and around St. Louis often know which hospitals to avoid: which places mistreated their own mothers, which pregnancy wards come with horror stories. As their due dates approach, many are shrouded with anxiety alongside the typical glow of an expecting mother.
We know the statistics: in St. Louis County, Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants. Black mothers giving birth in the region were also, according to a 2019 study, nearly twice as likely to die giving birth.
These statistics are terrifying. But they don’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. We must push towards Medicaid reform to keep more Black mothers and babies as safe and healthy as possible—and continue to direct as many vital resources as possible towards culturally competent groups such as Jamaa Birthing Center.
As a group of Black birthing clinicians wrote in a poignant open letter this week about some of their lost colleagues, “We grieve the recent pregnancy-related deaths of Mrs. Kira Johnson, Dr. Shalon Irving, Dr. Chaniece Wallace, and so many other sisters’ names whom we do not know, but we know that they represented the best of us and they are gone too soon.”
In the St. Louis area, as we know, Black women are still dying in childbirth at an unacceptable rate. It has been this way for a long time because we have a medical system that is running hundreds of years late in its attempts to acknowledge and adequately treat Black pain.
“This collective consciousness of the risk that is carried with our pregnancies casts a shadow of fear over a period that should be full of the joy and promise of new life. We fear that our personhood will be disregarded, our pain will be ignored, and our voices silenced by a medical system that has sought to dominate our bodies and experiment on them without our permission,” the clinicians wrote.
The eight Black clinicians who signed the letter noted that the Black pregnant patients they spoke with responded to the question “what do you think is your risk of dying because of pregnancy or childbirth?” with answers that ranged from 1% – 60%. The real risk of death in childbirth for Black women is 0.000417% — lower than the risk of death from walking down the street or driving a car.
The vast majority of individual Black pregnant women will have happy, healthy pregnancies, despite the terrifying population-level data. We cannot make the fear go away entirely until we have a more equitable medical system. But we can work to lessen it: we must continue to work towards passing the Medicaid expansion Missouri voters have already agreed on, though Republicans in the state government obstinately refuse to pay for it.
Recalcitrant Republicans have continued to ignore the voters’ wishes, despite the large incentive the Biden Administration has offered to sway Medicaid expansion opponents. The $1.9 trillion spending package provides additional hundreds of millions to bring expansion to the state. Without this expansion that is being blocked by some cruel, indifferent Republicans, many hardworking people will be hurt, including many Black women. These backward-thinking Republicans have run out of excuses for opposing this change policy that would bring big health gains to the addressing of many disparities in access and quality of health care available to thousands of Missourians.
The suffering and even the lives of many Black women in particular are, in a real sense, on the line.
More information on Black Maternal Health Week, along with resources for Black birthing people, can be found at https://blackmamasmatter.org/bmhw/
