Medical school curricula, for example, include false claims that black women’s nerve endings are “less sensitive” and require less anesthesia, and that black women’s blood clots faster than white women’s, leading to delayed treatment for dangerous hemorrhages. . It found that textbook depictions of childbirth depicted European women’s pelvic anatomy, which could lead to unnecessary interventions when non-white variation was deemed “abnormal or high risk.”
“When a black woman dies in childbirth in Sao Paulo, Bogota or New York, it’s often her lifestyle or personal failure: she didn’t make it in time to see a doctor or a nurse, she becomes poor. Life decisions, she’s subjected to certain medical conditions. And then the world goes on,” Dr. Kanem Said.
The new report, he said, “clearly refutes that.”
Background: Maternal mortality is increasing.
The overall maternal mortality ratio of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in Latin America, North America and the Caribbean increased by nearly 15 percent between 2016 and 2020, raising authorities’ interest in possible contributing factors, including race. There are more than 200 million people of African descent in the Americas – one in four people in Latin America and the Caribbean and one in seven in the United States and Canada.
Among countries that provide maternal mortality rates by race, the United States has the lowest overall mortality rate, but wide racial disparities. Black women in the United States are three times more likely than white women to die during or soon after childbirth. Those problems persist across income and education levels, as black women with college degrees are 1.6 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women who have not yet completed high school.
What’s next: UN calls Medical schools, health care providers and governments take action.
UN officials urged medical schools to re-examine their curricula and hospitals to strengthen policies around denial of care and patient abuse. Medical teams must consider innovative ways to help black women overcome structural barriers that make it difficult to get adequate prenatal care, officials said, such as reliable transportation and lack of access to insurance. The agency suggested partnering with various black traditional healers and midwives to help navigate longstanding reservations.
The UN project revealed a deep lack of surveillance data, which it said left the problems poorly understood. The report encouraged every country to step up its data collection efforts. Without a transparent view of the problem, it is impossible to design interventions to alleviate it, the report said.
