“People believe that birth control-it’s better, like you said, oh, because then you won’t get pregnant and you won’t need to have an abortion,” she added. “I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature? And if it should, I would have to side with it should not be legal,” Republican Jacky Eubanks said in a recent interview with the site Church Militant. “They are high because of the devastating impacts of structural racism and individual bias.” As Politico notes, Black mothers are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white mothers in the U.S., which has the worst mortality rate among developed nations and where “17 mothers die for every 100,000 pregnancies in the country.” In Louisiana, Black mothers are four times as likely to die than white mothers.ĭonald Trump’s pick for a Michigan state Senate seat is promising to ban all birth control if she gets the chance. Let’s start with the idea that Cassidy-who wants to defund Planned Parenthood is all, Yes, on its face, our maternal mortality rates are abysmal, but if you only count white women, they’re not that bad! Then there’s the phrase “for whatever reason.” In fact, there is one very big reason in particular- perhaps you can take a guess? “It’s no mystery why maternal mortality rates are so high among Black women,” Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health said in response. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.” Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. In an interview with Politico, the following words came out of Cassidy’s mouth: “About a third of our population is African American African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. But according to GOP senator Bill Cassidy, the rate at which women die during pregnancy or shortly after is not as bad as it seems-if you subtract the deaths of Black women, which apparently don’t count. And in Louisiana, which has a similar trigger law that will go into effect upon Roe being reversed, maternal mortality rates are among the worst in the nation. Wade is overturned, has the highest rate of child poverty in the country and recently rejected a bid to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage. Mississippi, for example, where abortion will immediately become illegal if Roe v. As conservatives across the country wage war on reproductive rights, demanding by law that women be forced to carry any pregnancy to term, regardless of the circumstances, they frequently (slash always) like to forget that they do absolutely nothing to support these people during said pregnancies or after.