User:Mbgthinks/sandbox

Maternal Death is a global health issue that affects all areas of life but in particular black women have faced disproportionally higher rates of death than white woman. This Wikipedia page fails to detail this disparity of healthcare for women of color. It contains about a paragraph with facts about the rates of maternal death between black and white women and acknowledges the disparity but does not go further than that. A section dedicated to the ethical issues and a further acknowledgment of this issue could improve the overall quality and completeness of the article.

Maternal Death In the United States Section

“Black women’s poor reproductive outcomes are often seen as a women’s personal failure. For example, Black women’s adverse birth outcomes are typically discussed in terms of what the women do, such as drinking alcohol, smoking, and having less than optimal eating habits that lead to obesity and hypertension. They may be seen to be at risk based on the presumption that they are ‘single,’ when in fact they have a partner- but are unmarried.”. Black women in the United States are dying at higher rates than white women in the United States. The United States has one of the worst maternal mortality rates despite it being a developed nation. The health care system in the United States is flawed by a systematic bias against people of color dating back to centuries of oppression and racism dating back to slavery.

Prevention Section

Another important preventive measure that is being put in is specialized education for mothers. Doctors and medical professionals providing simple information to women, especially women in lower socioeconomic areas will decrease the miscommunication that often occurs between doctors and patients. Training doctors will be another important aspect in decreasing the rate of maternal death, “The study found that white medical students and residents often believed incorrect and sometimes “fantastical” biological fallacies about racial differences in patients. For these assumptions, researchers blamed not individual prejudice but deeply ingrained unconscious stereotypes about people of color, as well as physicians’ difficulty in empathizing with patients whose experiences differ from their own.”

http://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/health/reports/black-womens-maternal-health.html