How Unconscious Bias in Health Care Puts Pregnant Black Women at Higher Risk

Shakima Tozay was 37 years old and six months pregnant when a nurse, checking the fetal heart rate of the baby boy she was carrying, referred to him as “a hoodlum.” Tozay, a social worker, froze. She had just been hospitalized at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, with preeclampsia, a life-threatening complication of pregnancy, and she is Black. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “A ‘hoodlum’?” she said. “Why would you call him that?” The fetus was

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