“I knew getting pregnant meant that regardless of my socioeconomic status or education, as a black woman I was more than three times as likely to die during labor or in the weeks afterward compared to my white counterparts.”

Recent news stories have drawn attention the dismaying medical experiences of black women during and after childbirth, with even celebrities like Serena Williams and others finding their concerns about potentially life-threatening symptoms going dangerously unheeded by nurses and physicians. The statistics about maternal death from pregnancy or childbirth complications among black women tell us that such stories aren’t isolated examples but part of a larger pattern.

Illustration by Annelisa Ochoa.

A thoughtful professor weighs her options.

All of which makes the personal story told by Sheria Robinson-Lane, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, in this month’s Reflections essay (“Birthing by the Numbers“) particularly timely. And yes, nuanced. She knows the numbers and she knows the stories about communication issues experienced by black women with their providers. However, she’s also affiliated with a respected major medical center.

So when she gets pregnant with her second child at age 39, what’s her best course of action in deciding where to have her child? It’s not a simple decision, and she knows it. But, she tells us, “I decided to improve my level of comfort—and possibly decrease my level of risk—by having my baby at a hospital that cared for more minorities and delivered more black babies . . . . the same small, no-frills, ‘baby friendly’ hospital where I’d delivered my son.” 

Complications happen.

As it happens, a complication does develop for Robinson-Lane when it comes time to give birth. Read the rest of the essay to learn how the providers respond and what the outcome was. Robinson-Lane doesn’t ever simplify the issues. The conclusions she draws can only be provisional.

But in speaking eloquently from her own experience and describing the personal calculus behind her own choice of a birth hospital, and then her birth experience itself, we get a picture of the vulnerability a mother feels in such situations—and the possible factors that can come into play between a successful and a tragic childbirth. The article is free until October 15.