What should have been a joyous first pregnancy quickly turned into a nightmare when she began to suffer debilitating stomach pain.
Her experience is a reflection of the medical racism, bias and inattentive care that Black Americans endure. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
From birth to death, regardless of wealth or social standing, they are far more likely to get sick and die from common ailments. Angelica Lyons carries her son while her younger sister, Ansonia Lyons, finishes her snack in the background. She called the University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital’s labor and delivery unit to tell them she was having a hard time using the bathroom and her stomach was hurting. A woman who answered the phone told her it was a common pregnancy issue, Angelica said, and that she shouldn’t worry too much.
Angelica was eventually moved to the labor and delivery floor of the hospital so they could monitor her son’s heartbeat, which had dropped slightly. There, they performed another enema that finally helped with the pain. She also was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can cause severe pregnancy complications or death.“I got worse and worse with the pain and I kept telling them, ‘Hey, I’m in pain,’” Angelica said.
He was OK. But Angelica felt so much had been taken from her. She never got to experience those first moments of joy of having her newborn placed on her chest. She didn’t even know what her son looked like. A spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement to The Associated Press that they couldn’t talk about Angelica’s case because of patient privacy laws.
To fully understand maternal mortality and infant mortality crises for Black women and babies, the nation must first reckon with the dark history of how gynecology began, said Deirdre Cooper Owens, a“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.
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