When statistics hit home
Many who work to improve maternal health have gone through issues themselves or had loved ones who did.
Jill Arnold, founder of the Maternal Safety Foundation in Bentonville, Ark., became a consumer advocate after giving birth to her two daughters, now teenagers. With the first birth, Ms. Arnold said she was intensely pressured at the last minute to have a C-section. She held out, resisted, and delivered a healthy baby vaginally.
For her second childbirth, she chose an accredited birth center that allowed her to have a doula and a midwife.
“The care I received was night and day,” she said. “The overwhelming pressure to consent to a C-section wasn’t there.”
She welcomes the information provided by the new U.S. News & World Report rankings as well as the upcoming “Birthing Friendly” designations.
“The onus shouldn’t be on patients, on individuals, on pregnant people to do the research,” Ms. Arnold said.
Rather, women and their partners need information at their fingertips so they can make an informed decision about how to give birth and where.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), who cofounded the Black Maternal Health Caucus in April 2019, with Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), wrote a touching blog in the journal Health Affairs to explain her passion in improving maternal health.
Her former classmate, Shalon Irving, who went on to become a CDC epidemiologist, died in February 2017 at age 36, just 3 weeks after giving birth, when she developed complications from high blood pressure.
In the blog, Ms. Underwood cited statistics and provides details of the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, then ends the blog, published in 2020, with an update on how Ms. Irving’s then 3-year-old daughter, raised by her grandmother, is doing. While Soleil is “curious, joyful, and brilliant,” the grandmother told Ms. Underwood that she has also walked into a room and found the little girl clutching a framed photograph of her mother.
The child’s question is understandable and heartbreaking: She wants to know where her mommy is.
“Soleil’s question is my motivation,” Ms. Underwood wrote. “To honor Shalon, and all the women like her who we have lost, let us take the serious and urgent action that is required to save our moms.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.