Zahnell Pinnock holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia storytelling and is a recent graduate from the Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte.
Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade last year, abortion access has been banned or restricted in at least 21 states — my home state, North Carolina, among them.
As a young Black woman of childbearing age, I find this both alarming and deeply personal. As recently as 2021, the maternal mortality rate for Black women in North Carolina was more than 2.5 times that of white women. Now, motherhood can only be more dangerous for people like me since the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a 12-week abortion ban in July.
Republicans did not invite any of the Black women Democratic members of the legislature to contribute to the bill, according to NC Newsline. Senator Kandie Smith, who represents Pitt County, pointed out during the abortion ban debate in May that Black women have fought since slavery to gain freedom over their bodies.
“We’re placed back in the situation where someone is trying to tell us what to do with our bodies,” Smith said. “We’ve been fighting against that long enough. That is not okay.”
And yet, the GOP elbowed out Black state legislators, who make up 21% of North Carolina’s General Assembly. Such behavior adds to a long list of racist patterns that Black women have faced in their pursuit of maternal health care.
Other obstacles surfaced in a study of maternal health care for women of color by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina in 2021. Study participants reported being dismissed and feeling undervalued in health care settings. Doctors and nurses appeared to make assumptions rather than treat them as individuals, many said.
“These assumptions included the dangerous notion that, because they are Black, they are strong and have a high pain tolerance,” the study said.
Advocates for better care also point to Tomeka Isaac, whose son Jace died in utero in a Pineville hospital because of the rare but life-threatening pregnancy condition called HELLP Syndrome. This severe type of preeclampsia also nearly cost Issac her life. She explained in a panel discussion last year that she could have received an earlier diagnosis had her doctors merely done blood and urine tests.
Now come these abortion bans, which are sure to disproportionately affect Black women already burdened with implicit bias and inadequate health care, as well as unequal access to housing, education and jobs.
Why should we be surprised, then, that Black women are more likely to have an abortion? Many need this option to compensate for all that society has denied them.
“The way that people end up wanting to terminate a pregnancy is shaped by structural inequalities in access, (in) the ability to plan your reproductive life,” Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CNN in an interview. “But that’s shaped by one’s experience with racism.”
State Sen. Natalie Murdock (D-Durham) collaborated with her female colleagues to file several bills to tackle the state’s maternal health crisis, specifically inequities in Black maternal health. A key piece of legislation is the MOMnibus Act, which mirrors U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood’s federal collection of bills with the same name.
If North Carolina’s legislature gave its approval, the bill would launch a state-funded Maternal Mortality Prevention Grant Program, set up implicit bias training for physicians working in perinatal care, define perinatal care as a human right, and help make lactation consultant training programs more diverse and available to parents.
“Senator Murdock can’t speak for her Republican colleagues, but their actions this session surrounding maternal health reflect a focus on restricting prenatal care and access to abortions,” a legislative assistant to Murdock, Divine Earth-Dowd, told me in an email.
Fully 70% of all pregnancy-related deaths are deemed preventable, according to North Carolina’s most recent Maternal Mortality Review Report. The collection of bills put forward by Murdock and others would address several issues raised in the report, Earth-Dowd said.
“We know we have to get a handle on how Black women and women of color are treated in health care settings,” Murdock told NC Health News.
Earth-Dowd urged North Carolinians to contact their members of the General Assembly and explain why this important piece of legislation is very much needed.
You can go to “Find Your Legislators” to identify your representatives based on your address. There, you will find email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses. You can also visit representatives’ offices when the legislature is in session in Raleigh.
“Facts and statistics are important, but what also garners support are personal anecdotes focused on pregnancy or birth complications and how provisions within the MOMnibus would help address that,” Earth-Dowd said. “It gives faces and stories to what we’re fighting for.”
