One of the Biden Administration’s top healthcare officials is sounding the alarm about persistent maternal health disparities for Black women, which they say don’t wane even as income and education levels rise.
Black women have long experienced higher rates of complications from pregnancy and childbirth, including miscarriage and stillbirth, than the population at large. Those disparities are known to be heavily concentrated among mothers with lower incomes, who are likely to be uninsured or live in communities with low concentrations of medical facilities.
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But many people assume that those challenges dissipate at least somewhat for Black women as they climb the income and education ladders and obtain college degrees and middle-to-upper income status. Unfortunately, those problems don’t decrease even as more money comes in, said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Income is not a protector for Black birthing people,” Brooks-LaSure said. “I, a middle class woman with education, am one of the few women in my circle who did not have a negative event in my pregnancy. I think a big part of that was that my provider was Black and I felt listened to. Many people don’t have that experience.”
In a report issued last June, the Biden White House laid out what it deemed a “maternal health crisis facing the United States,” in which overall maternal death rates are double in the United States than they are among other Western nations. As bad as that sounds, the numbers are startlingly worse for Black women, who suffer pregnancy-related deaths at a rate more than triple that of white women per 100,000 live births, according to the report, which also echoed Brooks-LaSure’s comments.
“These disparities persist regardless of income, education, geography and other socioeconomic factors,” it reads….
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