Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bridges, Khiara M

Titel

Racial disparities in maternal mortality

Ist Teil von

• New York University law review (1950), 2020-11, Vol.95 (5), p.1229-1318

Ort / Verlag

New York City, NY: New York University School of Law

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Racial disparities in maternal mortality have recently become a popular topic, with a host of media outlets devoting time and space to covering the appalling state of black maternal health in the country. Congress responded to this increased societal awareness by passing the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' at the tail end of 2018. The law provides states twelve million dollars annually, for five years, to fund maternal mortality review commissions-interdisciplinary collections of experts that evaluate and investigate the causes of every maternal death in a jurisdiction. Fascinatingly, although activists, journalists, politicians, scholars, and other commentators understand that the maternal health tragedy in the United States is a racial tragedy, the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' completely ignores race. Indeed, the term "race" does not appear anywhere in the text of the statute. The irony is striking: An effort to address a phenomenon that has become salient because of its racial nature ignores race entirely. The racial irony embodied by the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' serves as an invitation to investigate not only the Act itself, but the national conversation that is currently taking place about racial disparities in maternal deaths. Indeed, in important respects, if the general discourse that surrounds racial disparities in maternal mortality is impoverished, then we should expect that the solutions that observers propose will be impoverished as well. This is precisely what this article discovers.