Woman’s Hour today

[Ramblingnamechanger]

Important discussion about the horrific experiences of black women using maternity services. However Caroline Nokes was heavily invested in her party not taking responsibility for levels of poverty, deprivation, and racism. The woman constantly talking about “birthing people” was not challenged on the use of that expression. It is clearly black women who were being talked about.

Fair enough!
I have repeated conversations with a friend that go, 'Transwomen, remind me, does that mean the men who think they are women or the women who think they are men?' so I never assume a shared vocabulary on these things any more.

fromorbit · Yesterday 09:52

Beowulfa · Yesterday 09:14

White slave owners on US plantations deliberately used dehumanising language about their slaves, as they considered them livestock. I find it really concerning that people can't see the parallels here.

Exactly. Racism 2,0 like Sexism 2.0 is the same stuff dressed up

However this conversation is questionable in certain ways. Look at the stats in more detail. British African women have higher morality rates than British Caribbean women. Which is weird if it is just about skin colour.

This BIGGEST cause of maternal mortality is poverty it seems. If we got more money for all poor women of whatever ethnicity things would get better. The reason black women having bad outcomes is they are more likely to be poor.

It is weird the conversation has got sidetracked onto race when the real issue is

1 - our society doesn't like mothers

2 - doesn't support poor mothers enough.

This I think is because feeling guilty about race is way more acceptable than the deeper reality of NHS failings and poverty.

Take a look at the full reports. Do not get distracted by the media hype.

https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-uk/reports

Thank you. I looked at the screenshot of the report you linked, and I see what you mean about poverty being the greatest driving force, not just being black.

But it seems likely there might be other factors too related to Doctors and midwives perhaps not communicating effectively with Africans, the worst affected, who in their turn may feel diffident and shy about questioning a doctor if they have been brought up with cultural mores meaning this could seem wrong.

Poverty does have a strong impact on maternal mortality rates, both because of the physical and mental tear and wear it causes to the women experiencing it and because the health services may treat poorer patients differently.

Ideally, the studies of black maternal mortality deaths are done while also addressing income differences, language differences etc. so that we can see to what extent the problem can be ameliorated by altering health care services and to what extent we need to tackle the impact of poverty and the effect of race/racism on becoming/staying poor.

I know, however, from some US data that African-American women whose roots are in certain areas of Africa have a higher risk of hypertension during pregnancy, and this is not often understood by health care providers and affects African-American women of all income classes. Something like this can be changed by better training of the providers, and providing translators and culture-appropriate care is also important.

But I suspect that poverty still is the largest factor here.