Holy Shit, Now We Say Childbirth Is Racist?

A new wrinkle.

I’d very much like to someday have the experience of “being in the room” for a childbirth. I’ve never had that particular life marker, and it increasingly seems like I won’t. So that’s sad, and I’ve tried to ask guys about said moment a few times in my life. Mostly you get a profound heaping of absolutely nothing in return, i.e. “I don’t know man, it was messy down there.” Since I’ve never lived through a 40-week pregnancy I created or an in-room childbirth, I am no doubt not an expert on anything that comes after this paragraph.

I did just read this, however.

Which I believe is written by the same woman who was the focus of a maternal mortality piece on 60 Minutes:

You get down towards the bottom of that article, and you get this:

Why do we ignore the voices of Black women? Unconsciously, we in the medical field have developed biased beliefs about Black women based on stereotypes. There is a biased belief that Black women are overly loud and demanding and that we can take more pain than our white counterparts. A study has shown that some medical residents believe that Black people have thicker skin, and therefore do not feel pain in the same way as other racial groups. In the same study, participants who endorsed such false beliefs were less likely to prescribe appropriate pain medicine. Such biases create inequities in health care delivery.

That’s probably the truest thing that has been written about race and class in The New York Times since 2017, I’d guess.

Even before that paragraph, you have this: