Tatyana Ali played Ashley Banks in "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" from 1990 to 1996, and entered Harvard University the following year, where she led Revised government and African American studies. In 2016, Ali and her husband, an English professor at Stanford University, welcomed their first child, but after the mother and baby were brutally treated by the hospital's obstetric team, she testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee last Thursday.

"A doctor climbed up to the bed, pushed his forearm into my abdomen and squeezed it down-like my baby is toothpaste," she said. "Then, when my husband and I yelled "no" to the tweezers, they used suction: the plunger. I screamed, "Stop! "Because they actively ejected it from his head again and again, four times." Not long after, Ali said that she lost consciousness.

Ali’s story—the least terrible story told at the committee’s "Black Birth" hearing—shows that long-standing statistics show that in the United States, black women’s money, education, or status cannot protect them from Abuse during childbirth and childbirth. If doctors or nurses do (or don't do) things that kill them or their babies, financially secure black women with an Ivy League degree must be as worried as those with less money and education.

Obstetrician Veronica Gillispie-Bell, head of women’s services at Ochsner Medical Center in Kenner, Louisiana, testified on Thursday: “Compared with white women with college degrees, black women with college degrees are more likely to suffer from serious maternal diseases. Sex is twice that. Not as good as a high school diploma." In New Orleans, this finding applies even to black women with graduate degrees.

However, this is what Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio) said in a speech on Thursday: “In these urban centers, in many cases, there is a lack of leadership....These in our inner city People, the black community, have been trapped in poverty. We have all heard of housing, mental health problems, drugs, and suicide. One of the reasons they fall into poverty is that our education system has completely failed our black community and they have no choice. Go out or get a better opportunity. We have many families in the black community [there] where the father is not. So I believe there are many other problems that will involve this problem." said Gibbs, who touted the "opportunity zone" as a solution , "Poverty is the root cause of this problem."

This is not true. But even so, Gibbs does not seem to notice the role of racism as a source of poverty.

Because of racism, black women in this country suffer more during childbirth. In an interview three days before the hearing on Thursday, Dr. Gillispie-Bell, who is also the medical director of the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Cooperation Organization, said that there is no way to deal with these numbers honestly, otherwise they will say otherwise. However, she said that in 2018, as the cooperative began working with fertility centers to reduce the number of terrible fertility stories in Louisiana, when racism was listed as the reason for the higher fertility rate in black women, “some teams Feel offended and quit". Terrible story.

In her testimony on Thursday, she said that the so-called father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, chose not to use anesthetics when he used enslaved women to perfect his surgical technique. "It's long-lived and published in textbooks," she said. "It's black people who don't feel pain in the same way." Black's Gillispie-Bell said that a recent survey of white medical students and residents revealed that They believe that "we don't feel pain in the same way."

Gillispie-Bell said earlier this week that perinatal cooperation can help reduce the number of serious maternal incidents with strategies that include emergency treatment of hypertension and assessment of the risk of bleeding in patients. But the work continues. "Hidden prejudice and structural racism will not be resolved in three years," she said.

But we cannot stop addressing the issue of racism. Ali said that having a black midwife brought a different world to her second childbirth.

Dr. Joia Crear Perry, a former New Orleans obstetrician and head of the National Birth Fair Cooperation Organization, testified that under the supervision of a black provider, black babies are more likely to survive in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Pay attention to content about white providers. If we assume that their abilities are not lower than that of black providers, then besides racism, what can explain more black babies dying under their supervision? 

The author is the editor of the Louisiana Illuminator.

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