Tori Bowie died from complications in childbirth

[minsmum]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/65887510 she was only 32

I read this sad news yesterday. Sadly, it sounds as if she may may have had an eating disorder, bipolar and hadn’t been attending medical appointments. She didn’t want to have the baby in a hospital either . Her agent said that she was concerned about her but “As an adult you make your own decisions.”

It’s a tragedy, but it doesn’t sound as if race was the major factor in THIS particular case as it is in many others. I wonder where the baby’s father and her family were?

Too much treatment can be as dangerous as too little. It has been estimated that the US healthcare system kills as many people through over-treatment as under-treatment, thinking of the population in general. In this particular case, it sounds as if she may have made choices that resulted in under-treatment-so very sad.

Yes, I have a friend who's had the same issue to mine. A musculoskeletal thing, painful but not life threatening

The NHS basically told me there was nothing to be done, time, rest, a few stretches.

She has had multiple operations, £1000s spent on physical therapies and steroid injections courtesy of her private medical insurance.

Three years on I am fully recovered and she can hardly walk 😥

Relevant article from a few years back.

Researchers reviewed 1.8m hospital birth records in Florida from 1992 to 2015, and established the race of the doctor in charge of each newborn’s care.

When cared for by white doctors, black babies are about three times more likely to die in the hospital than white newborns.

This disparity halves when black babies are cared for by a black doctor.

Strikingly, the biggest drop in deaths occurred in complex births and in hospitals that deliver relatively more black babies, suggesting institutional factors may play a role.

source: the Guardian, August 2017

This is just awful I can't imagine what her pregnancy must fave been like for her.
I was on an antenatal ward for a week whilst they diagnosed a collapsed lung (initially thought it was a blod clot). Next to me was a woman who had preeclasmia. Sadly, her first baby died so this time she was hospitalised early on. The consultant came to speak to her and the woman genuinely didn't understand why it had happened again, she couldn't understand it was genetic and would likely happen with each pregnancy. The consultant was very patient but it must have been frustrating. She wasn't very well educated, was young and white and kept popping out for a fag! I remember thinking I wish I was this oblivious. I was reading a research paper on the risk of having some radiation tracer to check for a blod clot.

I remember reading that Serena Williams had a very difficult birth experience and felt that she wasn't heard and that assumptions were made about her experience of pain, as other posters have said. Having lived and worked in America in a deprived area I am sadly not surprised.

About the same rage I felt when I was called a "birthing person" instead of a woman/female???

It’s just so tragic because there are so many factors of discrimination here. Maybe she spoke to them and was ignored- despite a national tendency to over Medicate we all know that black women get less care and dismissed more. But maybe she didn’t go and ask as she was afraid of receiving care that endangered her or her baby, also a possibility she’d have been well aware of. There’s no good answer for even educated, wealthy people to ensure the best outcome sometimes when they live in entrenched marginalisation and bias.

Yep, lots of stuff being done in Lambeth and Southwark midwifery teams. And presumably elsewhere with high minority ethnic populations.

Healthcare teams are very aware of this (doesn’t just apply to childbirth, health outcomes generally are worse if you are black or asian in the UK). Long way to go, but people know it is a problem and want to fix it.

Systemic racism in maternity care is an urgent human rights issue

Black women in the UK are four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women, and Asian and mixed-race women are twice as likely.

Download our report Systemic Racism, Not Broken Bodies, the evidence from our year-long inquiry into racial injustice in maternity care.

https://www.birthrights.org.uk/campaigns-research/racial-injustice/

Not the time. This is about women and in particular black women receiving far from adequate care that results in higher rates of death.

In this particular case, @Simianwalk , my impression is that her mental health was the main contributor to this tragedy.
She wasn’t receiving inadequate medical care, she was avoiding medical care completely and possibly also suffering from an eating disorder. It’s awful.

This is about women and in particular black women receiving far from adequate care that results in higher rates of death.

I agree with this.

If you read my earlier posts in this thread, you’ll see I agree with you about the multi factorial discrimination that leads to worse outcomes for black mothers.

What I m cautious of is attributing any cause in this individual case, when we just don’t know at this stage.

The poorer healthcare extends (and in fact maybe even worse) in mental health care.

But we don't know that that's true yet. It seems like there are a lot of issues playing into this particular situation.
It appears she might not have pursued care herself - and that might have been because she was black, because she had mental health problems or because she was an athlete. Alysson Felix said that she trained in the dark up to 6 months pregnant so no one would know she was having a baby. Tori was found in bed in the process of giving birth. Her agent said that her health had been declining rapidly before her death and she had tried to help her and give her advice on care but Tori shut her down.

There have been studies for along time into why black people receive worse medical care and outcomes than other races. No one is in any doubt that racism plays the major part but there are other reasons too. Hopefully, this case will kick-start some action.

She wasn't very well educated, was young and white and kept popping out for a fag! @FemaleAndLearning

I remember attending a lecture about pregnancy and the lungs, and the obstetrician said that smoking actually protects against pre-eclampsia! So I just googled and found this:

Using data from the Swedish Medical Birth Register in a large epidemiological study of >600 000 Nordic women, the authors conclude that use of Swedish snuff, a smokeless tobacco, did not reduce the risk of preeclampsia and gestational hypertension but that tobacco, when smoked, did. They infer that combustion products of tobacco, such as carbon monoxide (CO), protect against preeclampsia but that constituents of tobacco, such as nicotine, do not.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.109.148973#:~:text=Although%20smoking%20during%20pregnancy%20may,of%20preeclampsia%20and%20gestational%20hypertension.

Yes, MH care is pretty dire here in the US. It’s improving, but is years behind other countries.

I imagine Tori had access to the best healthcare during her Olympic training, but who knows what happened in recent years. She may have just been dropped. Poor lady.

She was 8 months pregnant and weighed 6.5 stone! She refunded any attempts by friends and family for help and didn’t seek any maternal care throughout her pregnancy.

So much more to this story.

I don't know many black women here or in the US (family and friends) who don't have to brace themselves when accessing services whether health, mental or otherwise. It's usually better when you are dealing with another black person, though even then its a challenge more often than not. I have first hand experience of racism in health care in this country and I have black family and friends who work in the system. Their view, based on experience, access to date and research is damning. My own experience has been challenging at times, many times I was able to advocate for myself, but others I was too weary to.

Tori Black before anything else- sex, mental health, physical health etc. It is difficult to imagine that race was not a contributory factor given her likely lived experience. (Black +mental health)x(Black +physical/womens' health) = Perfect storm.

I have two black parents, who were born in the same predominantly black country, yet my midwife (white) wrote Caucasian on my maternity booking form. I am a light skinned black person, but am not white nor the lightest shade of black. I was not asked she just wrote it down. Ethnicity matters both for risks during pregnancy and for new born screening eg sickle cell, thalassaemia etc

Tori Black before anything else- sex, mental health, physical health etc. It is difficult to imagine that race was not a contributory factor given her likely lived experience. (Black +mental health)x(Black +physical/womens' health) = Perfect storm.

And that knowledge of that shared experience may well have informed the decisions she took. ie not trusting the medical profession to give her the best care, complicated by her mental health issues. ie there seems to be contradictory information about which medicines are safe to continue taking whilse pregnant.

Again, read my earlier posts. We aren’t in disagreement. But the immediate cause of death may well have been her eating disorder.

The trouble with claiming that an individual’s death is due to any particular cause before we actually know is that - if it turns out to be wrong- it’s then used as a gotcha.

Whatever this individual tragically died from, there is a massive problem with the outcomes for black mothers.

There is some benefit to white women in focusing on the immediate cause of death but there little to no benefit to black women, given the disparity in outcomes between them and white women during pregnancy and delivery. It's quite frankly dangerous to ignore the wider issues for black women that may contribute to a tragic event like this. Context is everythng. For example, I know a senior obstetrician who works in a neonatal unit with a higher death rate than any in the surrounding areas. At first glance that might cause alarm, but when you take into accountant that this unit is where the most seriously ill newborns and infants are sent, the mortality rates make much more sense.

Bowie’s agent, Kimberly Holland, last spoke to Bowie two weeks before her death. She was excited to hear how the woman she considered a daughter was navigating pregnancy and asked if she was going to prenatal visits. Bowie was excited about being a mom. They talked about the baby clothes she’d recently bought. Holland figured Bowie was seeking medical care given that she knew the gender of her baby: a girl.

Holland said Bowie didn’t mention any complications, “so I didn’t have any red flags.”
One thing Bowie was clear on: not having her baby in a hospital. Holland did not pry into why, noting that Bowie’s decision reflects an increasingly common choice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/06/19/tori-bowie-pregnancy-black-women/