Black Mothers Face Dangerous Health-Care Disparities. Can Midwives Bridge the Gap?

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Today, only about eight per cent of babies are delivered by midwives, despite the fact that midwife-led care has been linked to fewer preterm births.
This film is a collaboration between The New Yorker and Retro Report.
“We’re not being taken seriously. We’re not being listened to. We’re not being heard,” Bruce McIntyre III says, as he recounts the harrowing story of his partner, Amber Isaac, whose pregnancy ended in her death, in April, 2020, due to complications. “They dropped the ball on this one,” he adds, his eyes bloodshot from crying. By “they,” he means medical providers, in the Bronx, where Isaac died. But “they” is also understood to mean the American medical establishment, which has stood by as the U.S. maternal-mortality ratio has increased by about fifty percent in less than twenty years. Women die of pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes in this country at a higher rate than in other wealthy nations, such as Canada, where the maternal-mortality ratio is just less than half that of the United States. Black women are about three times as likely to die of such causes as their white counterparts are—and the gap between Black and white mothers’ maternal-health outcomes has only grown in places like New York.

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