Black women still face health inequalities at birth. The Associated Press spoke to medical professionals about the obstacles black Americans face when seeking medical care. The year-long project examined how racism affects health inequalities today. The racist roots of medical practices revealed a harsh reality: Black patients are not taken seriously, and sometimes the outcome is disastrous.
Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that black children were the most likely to die prematurely compared to Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander (12.7%), American Indian/Alaska Native (12.3%), and Hispanic (10.2%). were born (14.8%). ), White (9.5%) and Asian (9.2%). Black mothers were more than twice as likely to die in childbirth as their white peers in 2021, according to the CDC. According to the same federal data, black infants died at a rate of 10.4% per 100,000 live births in 2020 compared to white infants (4.4%).
Angelica Lyons, a public health instructor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, contacted the university hospital’s maternity and maternity department when she began experiencing stomach pains during pregnancy. She recalled her students saying she “didn’t look good,” the Associated Press reported. Lyon’s pain was dismissed, she recalled of a woman on the phone: “She made me feel like my concern wasn’t important and as this was my first pregnancy I decided not to go because I wasn’t sure and thought , I might be able to do it.” overreacted.”
dr Laura Riley, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, told the Associated Press, “The way structural racism can play out in this particular disease is not taken seriously.” Riley pointed to maternal sepsis, a leading cause of maternal deaths — which is twice as common in black women as in white women. She added, “We know that delaying diagnosis leads to these really bad results.”
The Biden-Harris administration focuses on the state of maternal health in the US White House blueprint for tackling maternal health crisis. President Joe Biden has also committed $471 million in support of the Blueprint. The amount also requires “all states to provide continuous Medicaid insurance for 12 months after birth,” according to a White House briefing.