Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth
Not education. Not income. Not even being an expert on racial disparities in health care.
What’s more, even relatively well-off black women like Shalon Irving die or nearly die at higher rates than whites. Again, New York City offers a startling example: A 2016 analysis of five years of data found that black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school. The fact that someone with Shalon’s social and economic advantages is at higher risk highlights how profound the inequities really are, said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who met her in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and was one of her closest friends. “It tells you that you can’t educate your way out of this problem. You can’t health-care-access your way out of this problem. There’s something inherently wrong with the system that’s not valuing the lives of black women equally to white women.”
I wonder how much of a role epigenetics plays in this - which is even more of a case for white privilege. Epigenetics is a complex area of study but to simplify, the stress that someone's grandparent experienced might affect their grandkids 40 or more years later!