KIRA JOHNSON, PREGNANT WITH HER SON LANGSTON
COURTESY CHARLES JOHNSON IV
This story appears in the January 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
There are times when flip-flops and sweatpants seem appropriate. At a Saturday afternoon picnic in the park. Or at the county fair. Or when you’re a couple preparing for the arrival of Baby Number Two. Comfort is key.
But something made Kira Johnson, 39, change her mind on the evening of April 11, 2016.
“Babe, I want to look really pretty for Langston,” she told her husband, Charles Johnson IV, as she sat before her bedroom mirror brushing her hair. The next afternoon they would head to Los Angeles’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for the birth of their second son.
They were committed to raising “men that would leave a mark on the world and who have a sense of purpose and responsibility far beyond themselves,” Charles explains.
Baby Number One, born in 2014 by emergency cesarean section, was named Charles Spurgeon Johnson V, after his great-great-grandfather, the famed sociologist and first black president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. His little brother would be named after the legendary Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Kira packed jewelry and a dress so she could bring him home in style. Charles decided he needed to dress the part too. “You never know when you need to look like you have a little bit of sense and a little bit of money,” Johnson recalls thinking, as he scrapped the basketball shorts and T-shirt for a button-down shirt, slacks, and loafers.
The choice was as mindful as the selection of Cedars-Sinai, consistently ranked among the best hospitals in the United States. When you have all the other bases covered—a healthy mom, a healthy baby, the best prenatal care available—why not put the icing on the cake by having your baby at a world-class facility?
Langston Emile Johnson was born at 2:33 p.m. on April 12, 2016. The scheduled C-section seemed routine, and Kira was able to breastfeed just after giving birth. She helped introduce Langston to his 18-month-old brother before drifting off to sleep.
Charles was sitting beside his wife’s bed when he noticed blood in her catheter. It was after 4 p.m. when he first told a nurse about it, according to a complaint Charles filed in 2017 with a lawsuit he brought against Cedars-Sinai. Also included in the complaint are details about the care Kira received: The catheter was changed at about 5:30 p.m. and was followed by an ultrasound and blood work. The ultrasound showed signs of internal bleeding. Pain medication and intravenous fluids were administered. A CT scan was ordered at 6:44 p.m. Ultrasounds and blood work were repeated. A blood transfusion was given. Another four hours and still no CT scan. Another blood transfusion was given, according to the complaint. Kira was “pale and groggy,” Charles says, adding that she was “shivering uncontrollably.” Her abdomen was painful to the touch. Charles says he repeatedly asked hospital staff what was being done to identify the source of her bleeding.
“As a father and a husband, there’s a fine line between trying to advocate for your wife and crossing a line, particularly as a black man,” he recalls. Charles says he did not want to do anything that would be detrimental to his wife’s care.
Especially, Charles says, after one staff member answered his anxious query by saying, “Sir, your wife’s just not a priority right now.”
The CT scan never happened, according to the complaint. Kira was taken into surgery around 12:30 a.m., 10 hours after the C-section. Her abdomen was full of blood. Her last words to her husband, he says, were, “Baby, I’m scared.”
His wife’s fear rattled Charles, because bravery defined her: Kira had lived in China, spoke five languages, had a pilot’s license, and had driven race cars. But he assured her everything would be OK.
Kira died at 2:22 a.m. on April 13.
“‘We did everything we could to save your wife, but we couldn’t save her,’” Charles recalls the doctor telling him. It was “like watching my whole world crumble around me. It was like a bomb went off, and I see her mother fall on the floor, her aunt screaming, her brother just breaking.”
Surrounded by photos of his late wife, Kira Johnson, Charles Johnson IV, 37, plays with their children, Charles V, three (in lap), and Langston, two, at home in Atlanta, Georgia. Following an uncomplicated pregnancy, Kira died from internal bleeding 12 hours after delivering Langston by C-section.
“We were so prepared. We had this. We had the best of everything. We did everything right. And they’re standing there telling me they lost her?” Charles says.
According to the complaint, the autopsy determined that Kira died of internal bleeding after her C-section. Racial bias is not part of the complaint. A trial is scheduled for January. In October, the Medical Board of California found Arjang Naim, the attending physician who oversaw Kira’s care, to be grossly negligent. Naim said Kira Johnson’s death was unfortunate, adding that he did not expect her to pass away on the operating table during surgery. “I did as much as possible to take the best care of the patient,” he said. Naim was put on probation for four years.
A hospital spokesperson would not comment on the specifics of the case but said in a statement that “Kira Johnson’s death was a tragedy. We thoroughly investigate any situation where there are concerns about a patient’s medical care. Based on our findings, we make any changes that are needed so that we can continue to provide the highest quality care to our patients. This includes reviewing hospital procedures as well as the competency of health care providers.”
Diamond Morgan, 25, of Brooklyn, New York, delivered her first child at an area hospital and says the postpartum care was “very traumatizing.” Morgan then decided to go “where the white people go”— Mount Sinai in Manhattan—to deliver her second daughter. “They treated me like a princess, brought me a cake, took pictures—very attentive and nice and kind.”
Kira’s death was shocking but underscores a harsh reality: At a time when the pace of medical advances can be breathtaking—from genetic testing that can predict the likelihood of conditions to treatments that have never been more effective in targeting cancer and other diseases—the rate of maternal deaths remains stubbornly high in the United States: about 14 deaths for every 100,000 live births. Among 46 developed nations, the World Health Organization says, only Serbia and the United States had maternal death rates that worsened between 1990 and 2015. This rate includes mothers who die of complications within six weeks of the end of the pregnancy.
In the United States the problem is marked by two particularly alarming statistics: African-American women are about three times as likely to die of pregnancy-related causes as white women, and more than 60 percent of maternal deaths are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We have higher maternal mortality than much of the rest of the developed world; we are capable of doing the best in the world,” says William Callaghan, the CDC’s chief of maternal and infant health. The CDC defines a pregnancy-related death as a woman who dies while pregnant or within one year of the end of her pregnancy.
“When deaths are reviewed and we see what the contributing factors were, there are so many instances where communication was not carried out correctly, where people didn’t recognize urgency, or when the patient wasn’t listened to, or the delay in reaction.”
The maternal mortality rate for the United States remains far below those of developing nations in Africa, where 20 countries have maternal death rates of at least 500 deaths for every 100,000 live births. But even in those countries, where medical facilities and access to basic care often are lacking, maternal mortality rates have declined since 1990 by an average of almost 40 percent, thanks in part to low-tech solutions such as midwives and improvements in prenatal and postpartum care.
All women are vulnerable to the same pregnancy-related health conditions that can lead to death: postpartum hemorrhage, or excessive bleeding; preeclampsia, or dangerously high blood pressure; and sepsis stemming from an infection. So why are the maternal mortality rates for African-American women so high?
Researchers say the toxic stress that racial and ethnic minorities, including African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, experience—regardless of economic or social success—can erode their physical health. It’s known as “weathering,” a concept developed by University of Michigan professor of public health Arline Geronimus that suggests the health of African Americans deteriorates earlier than that of whites because of the cumulative effects of racism and bias. It may help explain why even black mothers with the highest levels of education are dying at higher rates than white women with the least education.
Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, believes that not only do bias and racism build up to affect the health of black women over time, but that stress from racism and poverty may have adverse effects as early as in utero or soon after a baby is born.
She also points out that unconscious bias from medical providers can affect the care black mothers receive. While training at Grady Memorial Hospital, she saw that providers would occasionally withhold epidurals and local anesthetics from African-American women. “You have people who believe that black women don’t experience pain the same way because they have higher muscle mass, that their pain fibers don’t fire as much. ‘That woman can push that baby out—she’s a big girl.’” Summing up, Montgomery Rice says, “They didn’t see the person in their totality.”
In developing countries, maternal deaths are vastly more prevalent and an accepted fact of life. Health care infrastructure is often sparse or nonexistent. Quality prenatal care and pregnancy information can be limited. More than 9,000 miles from Los Angeles, the dusty highway between Somaliland’s capital, Hargeisa, and its third largest city, Borama, pierces the horizon like an arrow. The landscape is dotted sparsely with thorny acacia trees, and the sun beats down like a drum.
Red capes identify graduates of the midwife training program at the Edna Adan University Hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland. The program has graduated 938 midwives so far, including Hoodo Mohamed Mohamoud, 18 (at left), Hoodo Mohamed Jama, 20 (middle), and Hodon Abdi Shire, 28 (right), who will work as midwives in their home regions.
Venture off the paved surface, and the only roads are rocky and perilous, sure to scar the undercarriage of all but the sturdiest utility vehicle. It’s hard to imagine a woman in labor surviving the journey, in a vehicle or on foot, from a remote rural area to a health facility. Somaliland is a self-declared nation in the Horn of Africa, though it is widely viewed internationally as an autonomous region within Somalia.
The main causes of maternal deaths in Somaliland are eclampsia (seizures or convulsions due to high blood pressure), hemorrhage, infection, and ruptured uterus. Other reasons include early or too many pregnancies, unassisted deliveries, and complications from female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice of removing external genitalia of girls and women in order to make them “pure” and suitable for marriage. The scarred tissue can narrow the birth canal, complicating childbirth.
In Somaliland, consent for C-sections or any kind of lifesaving procedure, including a blood transfusion or surgery, has to be obtained from a male relative financially responsible for a woman’s health, such as her husband or a man from her husband’s side of the family.
That is the landscape into which Edna Adan Ismail, the eldest of three children in a wealthy family, was born.
Her father, Adan Ismail, was the most senior Somaliland health professional in the former British protectorate, which declared its independence in 1960. Of her mother’s five deliveries, one girl died during a forceps delivery in a hospital, a procedure that had almost killed Adan. Another died after being dropped on his head by a midwife.
Feeling dizzy and weak six months after giving birth, Zamzam Yousuf, 35, came into a clinic in the village of Habasweyn run by the Edna Adan University Hospital. Her blood pressure was extremely high. Yousuf was treated by student midwife Farduus Mubarak, 22, under the watchful eye of the hospital’s founder, Edna Adan Ismail, 81.
Education traditionally was considered useless for girls, but Ismail encouraged it for all his children. He was furious upon returning home from a business trip when Adan was about eight years old to learn that her mother and grandmother had arranged for her to undergo FGM.
In 1954, at 17, Adan left Hargeisa to train as a nurse and midwife in London, England. Adan wanted to prevent girls and women from experiencing the trauma she endured during and after receiving “the cut,” as she calls FGM.
Now 81, Adan will tell you that her greatest achievement was not when she was Somaliland’s first female cabinet member. Her ultimate fulfillment comes from living at the Edna Adan University Hospital in Hargeisa as its on-site administrator. She rises every day before dawn and will not refuse a 9 p.m. meeting if it’s in service of her maternity hospital.
Adan says she begged, borrowed, and used her savings and pension to build the hospital.
A mother of seven, Ayesha Ciisa, 33, arrived at Borama Regional Hospital in Somaliland near death after delivering one of two twins at home. She came to the hospital by auto-rickshaw when the second baby could not be delivered in her village. Despite Ciisa’s severe bleeding, doctors were able to save her with a transfusion. The second baby was stillborn.
“The two main killers of pregnant women are poverty and ignorance,” Adan says, striking a regal pose from behind her desk. “A combination of those two kill more women than eclampsia or postpartum hemorrhage. So when you have a woman who’s illiterate, who’s poor—in Somaliland she’s also likely to be a nomad—she’s also lived a life where she’s never had any social justice. Superimpose on that a pregnancy that may have arrived when her body was not fully ready to receive a pregnancy. We delivered a woman here who was having baby number 21.”
Or she may be like the mother of the midwife and chief anesthetist at Edna Adan University Hospital, 27-year-old Hamda Omar Mohammed.
Omar’s mother, Samsam Mohammed, cooked for the construction crew as the hospital was being built in 2002, and Adan struck up an acquaintance. When Mohammed was not at her usual spot one day, Adan wondered why.
Mohammed was at home, bleeding nearly to death. A neighbor who had come to help had pulled on the umbilical cord when trying to deliver the placenta. The cord became detached, and Mohammed began to bleed. Mohammed’s husband ran to get help. Omar, then 11 and the eldest child of four, stayed behind to clean up the blood and look after her siblings. Adan arranged transportation to a government hospital, even donating her own blood to help save Mohammed.
Omar’s mother survived. Years later Adan persuaded that traumatized girl to become a midwife, one of the 938 she has helped train in Somaliland so far. “If I can help train a million midwives on the African continent, it will change the experience of childbirth. It will end the suffering for so many women and families.”
Over the swoosh, swoosh sound of a fetal monitor, Jontelle Gallman’s voice is surprisingly calm. The Washington, D.C., native checked into the George Washington University Hospital on a cloudy Tuesday morning in May, three days after heavy rains flooded her two-bedroom home. Gallman, 39, spent the weekend before her scheduled induced delivery searching for a new place to live.
WATCH HOW THESE WOMEN ARE SAVING BLACK MOTHERS’ LIVES
In the U.S., black women are 2.6 times as likely to die due to a pregnancy-related cause as white women. Briana Green, a perinatal community health worker at Mamatoto Village in Washington, D.C., is trying to change that.
The mother of three had maintained steady employment as a retail clerk and manager in the two decades since high school, often working 50-hour weeks and providing a good life for her family until 2015. Soon after, doctors diagnosed her with polycystic kidney and liver disease, a chronic genetic condition that causes cysts to grow in those organs.
Too sick to work and relying on Medicaid, the U.S. assistance program that provides health coverage to those with low incomes, Gallman was in the late stages of pregnancy with her fourth child when doctors identified a problem she’d faced previously: dangerously high blood pressure. Without a car and with meager finances, she depended on public transportation and support from friends and family to get to medical appointments and care for her children.
start interactive embed
YOUR GRAPHIC CODE GOES HERE SAMPLE STYLES. REMOVE ! TO SEE THIS Remove the following line if NOT using ai2html Generated by ai2html v0.66.4 – 2018-12-10 11:09 ai file: ngm-1901-maternal-mortality_ai2html.ai
Artboard: mobile
MOTHERS AT RISK
The United States struggles with pregnancy-related deaths, many of which are preventable. The causes range from a rise in pregnancy-related medical conditions and the age of women giving birth to a lack of standardized protocols across hospitals. The U.S. fares better than most developing nations (Sierra Leone has the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, at 1,360 deaths per 100,000 live births) but is one of only two developed nations whose rate has worsened in recent decades.
MATERNAL MORTALITY RATE
The rate is calculated as the number of maternal deaths while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, for every 100,000 live births.
Romania in 1990 had 120 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
70
IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
Ages 15 to 49
1990
MORE DEATHS
60
FEWER DEATHS
2015
NO CHANGE
50
THE OUTLIERS
The U.S. and Serbia are the only developed nations whose maternal mortality rates have increased since 1990.
40
30
The 2015 U.S. rate was 14 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
20
10
0
MATERNAL MORTALITY BY U.S. STATE
Average rate, 2011-2015
All ages
WESTERN
CENTRAL
EASTERN
40
30
20
10
0
WHICH AMERICAN WOMEN ARE DYING
Black women are 2.6 times as likely to die due to a pregnancy-related cause as white women. Older women also face greater risk.
U.S. deaths per 100,000 live births, 2011-2015
RACE/ETHNICITY
Black
47.2
Native Am.
38.8
White
18.1
12.2
Hispanic
Asian
11.6
AGE
35-44
38.5
25-34
14.0
15-24
11.0
HOW THEY’RE DYING
Heart-related problems are a leading cause of maternal death; heart attack risk increases with obesity and age.
2011-2014
15.2%
Cardiovascular disease
14.7%
Endocrine, blood, other disorders
12.8%
Infection
11.5%
Hemorrhage
10.3%
Heart-muscle disease
9.1%
Pulmonary embolism
7.4%
Stroke
Hypertension
6.8%
Unknown
6.5%
Other
5.8%
ACCESS TO PRENATAL CARE
Women with no prenatal care at all are up to four times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death.
Women with no care or only third-trimester care
Native Am.
12%
Black
9%
Hispanic
8%
6%
Asian
White
4%
WHEN THEY’RE DYING
Risk doesn’t end when pregnancy ends. Potentially fatal post-pregnancy complications include blood clots and hemorrhages.
38%
18%
45%
While
pregnant
Six weeks to one year after
End of pregnancy to six weeks after
THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION MAY ADJUST U.S. AND OTHER NATIONS’ DATA TO ENSURE COMPARABILITY AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL. *DE, NH, AND WY DATA 2005-2015. DATA UNAVAILABLE FOR ALASKA AND VERMONT. RACE (WHITE AND BLACK) EXCLUDES PEOPLE OF HISPANIC ETHNICITY. HISPANIC INCLUDES HISPANICS OF ALL RACES. ASIAN INCLUDES PACIFIC ISLANDERS. NATIVE AMERICAN INCLUDES ALASKA NATIVES.
MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF; KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI
SOURCES: “TRENDS IN MATERNAL MORTALITY: 1990 TO 2015,” WHO; CDC; “BUILDING U.S. CAPACITY TO REVIEW AND PREVENT MATERNAL DEATHS”; AMERICA’S HEALTH RANKINGS
Artboard: desktop-medium
End ai2html – 2018-12-10 11:09 END GRAPHIC CODE
end interactive embed
“I just felt like as hard as I had worked to keep things together, life was trying to defeat me,” she says. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
Standing in Gallman’s hospital room through most of the 12 hours of her labor and delivery, I couldn’t help thinking about my own mother, Eloise Blocker Jones. I am the ninth of her 10 children and one of the only three born in a hospital. We all had been born in poverty in Cairo, Illinois, a small town where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet that is known for its tumultuous racial history.
When Mama died in 2005, it never occurred to me that I would one day want to ask her about her pregnancy and childbirth experiences. After all, she had done her best to drum independence and self-sufficiency into each of her five daughters. Pregnancy before marriage was unthinkable, but to hear Mama tell it, it wasn’t exactly a picnic afterward either. I long to ask my mother how she felt as a 19-year-old about to deliver my eldest brother in 1947, far away from her family and friends in Philadelphia. Now I wonder how she endured as a poor woman with no family planning advice, no parenting education, no health insurance.
When Gallman’s Medicaid case manager recommended that she contact the Mamatoto Village maternity-support organization in Washington, D.C., she thought she might be able to get some nutritional advice that could improve her diet and boost her energy.
What Gallman got was a lifeline in the form of a perinatal community health worker named Briana Green.
The 39-year-old former corporate lawyer with a waist-length ponytail and a ballet dancer’s stride now enters Labor and Delivery Room 8 and heads straight for Gallman’s belly, rubbing it gently while also reaching for her hand.
“How are you holding up?” she asks, peering intently at her client through eyelids strained from lack of sleep. At any given time, Green works with about 50 pregnant or postpartum women, making home visits and offering counseling, education, and support. She accompanies them to doctor’s visits and is present during delivery.
Green may have been destined for this life: Her great-grandmother Nancy Gayles Burton had 17 children and was a revered granny midwife in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, in the 1920s and 1930s.
Green says she gave up a six-figure income in law and later selling real estate to train as a perinatal-support worker because of her own birth experiences. She says she was denied the opportunity to try for a vaginal delivery after a cesarean section, even after following guidelines to ensure she was physically prepared.
“I realized that if I, as an educated African-American woman with some financial security, couldn’t be seen or heard or respected, what about women who didn’t have a voice, who were probably being dismissed and mistreated from the minute they entered a health care setting?”
Cynthia Butler, 26, of Washington, D.C., lived in her car with her partner, Kenneth Brown, through her pregnancy. Brown was working but didn’t make enough money to cover living expenses. Butler says the stress of being “homeless, hungry, not knowing where my food would come from” was made worse because she had no income, little insurance, and no place to go but her car when it was “snowing and raining and freezing.” Mamatoto Village accepted Butler into its program, helping with the delivery of her son, Kenneth Brown, and providing much needed support services.
Jessica Flowers is only seven years old, but she’s strong, her grandmother Nicole Black says. Black will never forget how calm the little girl was when she called at 1:46 a.m. on July 4, 2018.
“She said, ‘Mommy’s fallen over in the tub, and she has foam coming out of her mouth,’” recalls Black, who’s 53 and lives in Tampa, Florida. A week earlier, Black’s daughter, Crystle Galloway, had delivered her third child, a healthy six-pound, four-ounce boy named Jacob Flowers, by cesarean section at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Black scrambled out of bed and over the short distance to Galloway’s apartment, where the 30-year-old mother was slumped over the bathtub.
Just a few hours earlier, Galloway had been sitting on the couch watching a movie and talking about the Fourth of July menu. She’d had a bit of pain from the C-section incision, but otherwise Galloway had been so happy, so proud to complete her family of two girls by adding a son.
Exactly what happened in the minutes between when fire medics, dispatched for a possible stroke victim, according to a Hillsborough County, Florida, official statement, arrived at Galloway’s home and when she was evaluated at an emergency room three blocks away was the focus of an investigation by Hillsborough County officials.
Black says that instead of checking Galloway’s vital signs and transporting her to a hospital, the medics asked whether her family could afford to pay the $600 ambulance fee. Black says that she begged medics to take her daughter in the ambulance.
At a press conference, Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said that there was confusion about transport and that a conversation about cost was between Black and sheriff’s deputies who arrived first on the scene and not with medics, according to the medics’ and deputies’ statements. Merrill also noted that fire medics admitted that Galloway nodded yes when they asked her directly if she wanted to be transported to the hospital. Merrill said the medics should have obtained an informed refusal document for them not to take her in the ambulance, and that did not happen. Black wound up driving her daughter to the emergency room. Galloway then was taken by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital, where she slipped into a coma. She died five days later.
Hillsborough County announced in September that it had taken disciplinary action against the four medics for violating standard operating procedure by failing to check Galloway’s vital signs, for falsifying documents, and for not having Black sign an informed refusal document for declining the ambulance ride for her daughter.
One medic was terminated; two were demoted. The three medics still on staff were suspended without pay for 30 days.
Nicole Black holds her grandson Jacob Flowers. A week after Jacob’s birth by C-section, his mother, Crystle Galloway, developed complications. Black called 911, but her daughter was not transported to the hospital by ambulance. Black drove her there instead. Galloway died five days later. Black’s hand rests on the urn containing her daughter’s ashes. The responding medics were disciplined for not following standard operating procedures, and one was fired.
Better and sustained health care support during mothers’ pregnancies and after they give birth seems a logical solution to help lower U.S. maternal mortality rates, but it’s not that simple. Doulas and midwives can charge upwards of $1,500 for their services, and many low-income mothers simply can’t afford that. California has made progress reducing the number of maternal deaths in the state by adding routine protocols at participating hospitals for common pregnancy complications such as hemorrhage and preeclampsia. Procedures such as measuring blood loss or administering high-blood-pressure medication when needed to prevent preeclampsia are part of a set of practices that medical facilities sometimes ignore or delay.
And as Charles Johnson says, simply listening to mothers and families is also important.
Every day Charles spends time reading, dancing, or playing with his sons in a light-filled room adorned with poster-size photos of Kira posing with family and friends, her smile beaming brighter than the sun’s rays. The boys often ask whether Mommy would have liked this song or whether she would have liked playing with their race cars.
Now raising his young sons alone, Charles devotes most of his time to telling Kira’s story to health officials, advocacy groups, and even the U.S. Congress.
“More than anything I want people to understand that these women we’re losing are more than statistics,” he says.
“They’re mothers, they’re daughters, they’re sisters, they’re friends,” he says. “And they’re leaving behind these precious children, and there’s no statistic that can quantify what it’s like to tell an 18-month-old that Mommy’s not coming home. Or to tell a two-year-old, who never will know his mom, how amazing she i
When Brittany Ferrell earned her pediatric nursing degree from the University of Missouri St. Louis in May of 2014, she’d already had lots of experience as a community activist.
During two years as president of the Black Students’ Nursing Association, Ferrell helped develop community outreach programs and workshops about sexual, mental and nutritional health, and used social media to publicize them widely.
Ferrell’s desire to link activism with neighborhoods came to an explosive head in August of 2014, after an unarmed 18-year-old black youth named Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
Shavanna Spratt, office manager of Jamaa Birth Village, attends a mothers’ group meeting with Denicia Billups and Jocelyn Lee at Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri. Jamaa, a word that means “family” in Swahili, is a self-proclaimed “sacred and safe space” for expectant mothers and families. It has helped more than 250 families in North St. Louis and nearby suburbs with perinatal care. Jamaa focuses on lowering maternal and infant death rates by providing doula services, nutrition education and breastfeeding support.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO
During nationally-televised protests, advocacy moved from the academic to the neighborhoods for Ferrell. She says she participated in the outcry about Brown’s death for 100 straight nights. Her vocal, prominent presence led to her being one of the central subjects of the 2017 Netflix documentary about the Ferguson uprising entitled “Whose Streets?”
Ferrell is known throughout Missouri and the Midwest for her community organizing and activism. She’s most passionate about the challenges for pregnant women of color in St. Louis and beyond.
“There’s absolutely no reason why black women should be dying at the rate we’re dying,” Ferrell says. “Just like state violence is allowing black folks to be shot dead in the street, and no one’s being held accountable or even having to atone for the death of black bodies, the same thing is happening in these medical institutions.”
That Ferrell’s reproductive health activism is unfolding in a town that made international headlines for social justice is no coincidence.
Missouri’s status as the state with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S. makes it a prime stage for America’s burgeoning “birth equity movement,” which suggest that factors like poverty, racism, social and economic policy impact African American mothers and babies from the moment they’re born.
Minoksho Gonzales and her son Kaleb are with nurse Jessica Garrett at the Family Birthplace at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Louis, the regional hub for maternal services and high-risk obstetrics. It is fully equipped with a Level III neonatal intensive care unit.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO
More than 700 women die each year in the U.S. from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth. Black women have a maternal mortality rate three times higher than that of white women. At least 60 percent of maternal deaths are preventable.
The House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill this week, the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, to fund state committees to review and investigate deaths of expectant and new mothers, to train providers to improve the quality of care and to make a summary of each maternal death available to the public. The bipartisan legislation, which authorizes $12 million a year in new funds for five years, would pay for research that would yield more accurate data and identify the specific factors fueling the death of mothers, enabling states local and state governments to develop more effective strategies to address the issue. The bill still must be approved by the U.S. Senate.
In fact, the past few years have yielded an unprecedented focus on the issue of maternal health—and death—for black American women. At the forefront of this movement are organizations like the National Birth Equity Collaborative, and the group Black Mamas Matter, both comprised of academicians, medical professionals and community health activists who have collaborated to develop compelling personal stories, research and policy strategies to reinforce the message that black women face serious, quantifiable risk of death or major disability related to pregnancy. The crisis is so real that a coalition of black women mayors from across the nation have formed a coalition intended to direct policies and resources to address the problem, without waiting for federal intervention.
“We can’t just talk about our reproductive health and rights from a single issue lens. Our lives are much more complex than that,” says Monica Simpson, executive director of the Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective based in Atlanta, GA. “The way that the multiple layers of oppression show up in our world is not the same way that privileged communities get to experience these issues. This is why black women came up with the term ‘reproductive justice,’ which is looking at connection between the very real social justice issues that come into our lives every single day.”
start interactive embed
YOUR GRAPHIC CODE GOES HERE SAMPLE STYLES. REMOVE ! TO SEE THIS Remove the following line if NOT using ai2html Generated by ai2html v0.66.4 – 2018-12-10 11:09 ai file: ngm-1901-maternal-mortality_ai2html.ai
Artboard: mobile
MOTHERS AT RISK
The United States struggles with pregnancy-related deaths, many of which are preventable. The causes range from a rise in pregnancy-related medical conditions and the age of women giving birth to a lack of standardized protocols across hospitals. The U.S. fares better than most developing nations (Sierra Leone has the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, at 1,360 deaths per 100,000 live births) but is one of only two developed nations whose rate has worsened in recent decades.
MATERNAL MORTALITY RATE
The rate is calculated as the number of maternal deaths while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, for every 100,000 live births.
Romania in 1990 had 120 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
70
IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
Ages 15 to 49
1990
MORE DEATHS
60
FEWER DEATHS
2015
NO CHANGE
50
THE OUTLIERS
The U.S. and Serbia are the only developed nations whose maternal mortality rates have increased since 1990.
40
30
The 2015 U.S. rate was 14 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
20
10
0
MATERNAL MORTALITY BY U.S. STATE
Average rate, 2011-2015
All ages
WESTERN
CENTRAL
EASTERN
40
30
20
10
0
WHICH AMERICAN WOMEN ARE DYING
Black women are 2.6 times as likely to die due to a pregnancy-related cause as white women. Older women also face greater risk.
U.S. deaths per 100,000 live births, 2011-2015
RACE/ETHNICITY
Black
47.2
Native Am.
38.8
White
18.1
12.2
Hispanic
Asian
11.6
AGE
35-44
38.5
25-34
14.0
15-24
11.0
HOW THEY’RE DYING
Heart-related problems are a leading cause of maternal death; heart attack risk increases with obesity and age.
2011-2014
15.2%
Cardiovascular disease
14.7%
Endocrine, blood, other disorders
12.8%
Infection
11.5%
Hemorrhage
10.3%
Heart-muscle disease
9.1%
Pulmonary embolism
7.4%
Stroke
Hypertension
6.8%
Unknown
6.5%
Other
5.8%
ACCESS TO PRENATAL CARE
Women with no prenatal care at all are up to four times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death.
Women with no care or only third-trimester care
Native Am.
12%
Black
9%
Hispanic
8%
6%
Asian
White
4%
WHEN THEY’RE DYING
Risk doesn’t end when pregnancy ends. Potentially fatal post-pregnancy complications include blood clots and hemorrhages.
38%
18%
45%
While
pregnant
Six weeks to one year after
End of pregnancy to six weeks after
THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION MAY ADJUST U.S. AND OTHER NATIONS’ DATA TO ENSURE COMPARABILITY AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL. *DE, NH, AND WY DATA 2005-2015. DATA UNAVAILABLE FOR ALASKA AND VERMONT. RACE (WHITE AND BLACK) EXCLUDES PEOPLE OF HISPANIC ETHNICITY. HISPANIC INCLUDES HISPANICS OF ALL RACES. ASIAN INCLUDES PACIFIC ISLANDERS. NATIVE AMERICAN INCLUDES ALASKA NATIVES.
MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF; KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI
SOURCES: “TRENDS IN MATERNAL MORTALITY: 1990 TO 2015,” WHO; CDC; “BUILDING U.S. CAPACITY TO REVIEW AND PREVENT MATERNAL DEATHS”; AMERICA’S HEALTH RANKINGS
deemagclinic
deemagclinic 