Black women in the United States die during pregnancy and childbirth at four times the rate of white women. This is not a new statistic, but it is important, disturbing, and telling.
What might be news to many is that the U.S. did not succeed in reducing our maternal mortality rate by 75%, one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) we were supposed to meet in 2015. The Maternal Health Task Force has just released an infographic, below, to highlight the gravity and scope of this problem.
The Millennium Development Goals were a set of time-bound commitments agreed upon and adopted by world leaders to commit their countries to address the worst global problems, like poverty, disease, and hunger. Many countries, including some of the poorest in the world, met the goals.
The U.S. was one of eight countries that not only failed to reach its maternal mortality target, but actually saw an increase in the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth. We’re in the company of countries like Afghanistan and El Salvador.
IIt is true that 99% of maternal deaths occur in developing countries and that overall, the U.S. is a relatively safe place for a woman to be pregnant and give birth. But no matter where women live, whether in Somalia or Seattle, maternal mortality starkly tracks income and privilege. In the United States, it also tracks along racial lines — so much so that in parts of the country, particularly in areas with high concentrations of black women, maternal mortality rates are comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.
The US will not improve our maternal mortality rates — or close the gap on the racial disparity — unless we take an equity-based approach to solving these problems.
And more to the point, we can’t keep talking about how black women are dying at much greater rates than white women without also talking about how inequity at the root of our social system is in part responsible for this differential.
Here are a few questions I’d like our health system to seriously consider:
- We know that racial discrimination has been linked to high-blood pressure in African-Americans, and we know that high-blood pressure during pregnancy can lead to pre-eclampsia (one of the leading causes of death in pregnant women). How can we use this information to improve the health of black women?
- Lack of access to healthcare — and more specifically, affordable healthcare — has been called out as part of the problem. Why do black women in particular have less access to affordable health care than the general population?
- Studies have found that the majority of doctors harbor “unconscious racial biases” against their black patients. How do we challenge medical schools to embed anti-racism education within their classrooms?
We have another opportunity to keep the pressure on US leaders. The MDGs have been replaced this year with the even more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are marked more by calls to address the root causes of poverty than the MDGs were. The United States has again committed to achieving each of these goals — including eliminating health disparities and ending all forms of discrimination against girls and women — by 2030.
If we are to close the maternal mortality gap between black women and white women by then, we need to be more active in calling out the ways in which our country’s racism (and, let’s be honest, sexism) contribute to it.
