spiked a fever after their daughter was stillborn. He said that she battled sepsis, which led to organ failure and three surgeries.
“I feel lost,” Clayton Anderson said. “There’s a lot of people in this house and it feels empty.”
Black maternal mortality rates have long been high in the United States. Black women are nearly three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In February, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, an OB-GYN at Sanctum Med + Wellness in Dallas, said that to reduce the Black maternal mortality rate, “There needs to be a fundamental change in the actual foundation of health care systems. That would be (addressing) insurance coverage, that would be (increasing) access to resources and tertiary care hospitals or systems that are in food desserts, underprivileged areas.”
Dr. Henning Tiemeier, the director of Harvard’s Maternal Health Task Force, called the high rate of maternal mortality among Black women “essentially one of the biggest challenges of public health.”
“We see that as a top of the iceberg of poor health in women and poor health in Black women,” Tiemeier said in an interview on “Face the Nation” in 2022. “And there are several reasons, there seems to [be], from poverty to discrimination to poor care for this group of women.”