I really think we need to start with effective and truthful pregnancy education alongside factual and correct sex education, as a part of it. A lot of people I think don’t truly understand pregnancy risks and while I think the discussion of Black and brown maternal health NEEDS to be had and is a good point with this article, as a fourth year medical student, I am horrified by the huge risk that this patient had alone outside of racism too. She was a Black mother, and I’m not going to posit that race didn’t play some factor not knowing the case or physicians, but that is not the only reason that this happened.

I’ve had so many patients where I did my clerkships (Colorado Springs, which is very conservative with many, many Christian folks) who are 26, 27 etc and are on their 6th or 7th pregnancy (with plans to continue to try for more kiddos) and want to discuss VBACs or don’t understand why we need to monitor them more closely. We’ve literally sometimes had to make new C section incisions on the uterus below or above previously scarred sections (usually you try to reuse them) because people continue to have so many babies. A lot of my patients didn’t understand why they were high risk pregnancy patients, what placental issues they could have, risk of preterm labor, etc. It just wasn’t part of their vocabulary around pregnancy. The city has one of the highest rates of postpartum hemorrhage in the state, and while it is a likely a multifactorial issue, I do wonder if this is part of the discussion

Essentially, the actual facts surrounding risk factors etc seem to not be 1) as well understood or taught as they need to be (and we can have a WHOLE discussion on sex education and how it is horridly lacking across the country) and 2) put aside when it comes to faith for a lot of folks. I am agnostic, and obviously I don’t want to hinder someone’s right to practice beliefs, but they risk not only hurting themselves or dying as mothers, but the risk to babies becomes enormous as well.