Opinion: NYC must end racial disparities in maternal mortality
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Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer is a candidate for Queens borough president. City Council Photography
By Jimmy Van Bramer
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the lethal racial inequalities in our healthcare system, both in access and quality.
From testing, to disparities in health outcomes, to the vaccine rollout, we’ve seen communities of color get left behind all across the country. Nationwide, Black people are dying from COVID at 1.5 times the rate of white people, and so far the data show Black people are not receiving vaccinations at the nearly same rate either.
Clearly the system is very much separate and unequal, but that’s not a recent phenomenon: For the last 30 years, there’s been another public health crisis in the making, and that’s the disproportionate rates of maternal mortality for Black mothers.
In 2016, New York State ranked 30th in the nation with 51.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 15.9 deaths per 100,000 live births for white women. And in New York City, Black women are up to 12 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts — while nationwide Black women are three to four times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women.
These disparities exist because of systemic racism, both within the medical establishment and in the world around it: Black women are ignored when they try to convey their symptoms to their medical providers, as Serena Williams famously shared following her pregnancy, and the chronic stress of experiencing racism is also linked to maternal health disparities.
Another factor at play is that many Black women experience coverage gaps throughout their lives, due in part to not being able to access job-based insurance, in addition to that several states have refused Medicaid expansion. Women without insurance — and consequently without affordable options — are less likely to receive prenatal care in the first trimester, which is also linked to higher rates of death later on.
About 50 years ago, the only Planned Parenthood servicing Queens shut down. Until 2016, there was not a single full-service Planned Parenthood Health Center in the borough that has the highest rate of uninsured women and girls in New York City. Planned Parenthood estimated that 5,400 Queens residents were traveling to one of the other four boroughs to access their free and low-cost reproductive healthcare and family planning services.
That was a huge problem. When Planned Parenthood came to me for help in the spring of 2013, I not only mobilized with my colleagues to secure the funding, but I insisted that the clinic had to be in my district. Now, right off the 7 train in Long Island City, there is finally a Planned Parenthood Health Center in Queens again, serving an estimated 20,000 women per year with reproductive and prenatal healthcare.
Black History Month is a reminder to amplify Black voices — which we should be doing every day — but it’s also an opportunity to educate and reflect on how we all have to be part of dismantling the racism baked into our lives. As a gay man who came to public service through civil rights activism, I was deeply unaware of the connection between reproductive rights and the LGBTQ rights. It was the queer women in the movement who informed me of my privilege and educated me on just how inseparable reproductive rights are from the LGBTQ movement.
As a white man, safeguarding and uplifting Black women’s lives and voices is essential to my work as an ally in the struggle for racial equality.
Jimmy Van Bramer is a councilmember Queens’ District 26. He is a candidate for Queens borough president.
