2 Black mothers speak out on hospital neglect

Two pregnant Black women nearly 1,000 miles apart were ready to do what many do every day: welcome new bundles of joy, and just before the start of the holiday season.

- BY FERNANDA FIGUEROA AND JAYLEN GREEN

LEON AND MERCEDES Wells with newborn daughter Alena at their home in Dolton, Ill., near Chicago.

(MARK VANCLEAVE Associated Press)

Instead, the health of both women and their babies was put at risk after hospital staff did not immediately provide the needed care.

One woman was discharged and delivered her baby on the side of an Indiana highway, and the other nearly gave birth in a Texas hospital's emergency waiting room. Both women survived but are still reeling from ordeals that have drawn national attention — in part because they were captured on video and shared on social media.

Each instance highlights the longstanding and rising disparities in health outcomes for Black women, who die at a rate nearly 3.5 times higher than white women around the time of childbirth, according to a 2023 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

Although maternal mortality rates for white, Latino and Asian women fell in 2023, according to the CDC report, the rate for Black women barely budged.

Now, the women’s families, health organizations and civil rights advocates are urging the medical profession to address systemic racism that they say perpetuates Black women’s experiences.

Mercedes Wells’ water had already broken when a nurse at Indiana’s Franciscan Health Crown Point hospital checked on her in triage, a room typically designated for women in earlier trimesters of pregnancy.

Wells, already a mother of three, knew the baby could come at any minute. The nurse did not believe she was going into labor, Wells recalled.

“She still suggested that I be discharged and I begged, ‘No, I can't be discharged. Please don’t discharge me because I am about to have this baby,’” Wells, 38, told the Associated Press from her Chicago-area home in Dolton, Ill.