Black Mom's Matter

I shared this on my IG earlier but I needed to share here:

I am so excited to be a mom. I feel blessed and grateful. 

But as a Black Mom to be, I can not say that I am not nervous about the process of birth. The medical field has been wicked to Black Women since J. Marion Sims used enslaved teenage girls for his experiments for gynecology without any anesthesia. 

Sha-Asia Washington was 26 years old when she went to Woodhull hospital with high blood pressure. She went untreated for two days - high blood pressure (preeclampsia) is extremely dangerous and should be treated immediately. She died during C-section delivery.

They left her to die. They ignored her for 2 days and left her to die.

This was preventable. She should be here with her partner Juwan Lopez, and baby girl Khloe. Instead, they are left to mourn her.

But as a 35-year-old Black mother, I have heard too many stories of women like me: women like Sha-Asia, Nicole Thea, Amber Isaac, and too many others, my heart breaks.

Sha-Asia, like Nicole Thea and Amber Issac, and so many others before them were ignored, their pain minimized, their symptoms dismissed, their lives, to these institutions, and the lives of their families didn’t matter. It is time long past to hold these organizations and the entire medical field accountable for the ways in which it has wronged Black People.

Here’s how you can help:

You can contribute to the GoFundMe set up for her

Support midwifery, doula, and advocacy-based organizations run by Black folk and people of color that are serving their communities. (Tag some of your faves below) Here are a few I have seen:

@phillydoulacoop
@doulasofcolor
@phillydoula
@myphillydoula
@womb.ish

I am personally looking for a black doula/midwife. If you are in the Philly area, please drop in my DMs.

Black mothers are THREE TIMES more likely to die in childbirth. From NPR:

"According to the CDC, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women's health. Put another way, a black woman is 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes. In a national study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition."

It's time to not only address but eliminate these racial disparities so that more Black mamas can come home with their babies. Black mamas matter.