Award of Excellence: Black Maternity Health: Taking Life Into Their Own Hands
A narrative picture story that explores an important social, economic, or political issue.
Black Maternity Health: Taking Life Into Their Own Hands
In Texas, a coalition of Black birth workers — and their clients — decided they must confront the national crisis of rising maternal deaths and critical complications, because the price of waiting on government and medical systems is too high.
The coalition is part of a diverse movement of women people who say they are unapologetic about seeing Black pregnancy through the lens of power, potential and promise rather than pathology. Their careers are informed by personal experience and by research showing Black mothers and babies suffer more than most in the deadliest place to give birth among high-income nations.
Black women in Texas — the state that accounts for 10 percent of the nation’s births — die at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts in connection with childbirth and at more than four times that of Hispanic women, according to a preliminary review in the state’s most recent Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee report.
