About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

95 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1229 (2020)
Racial Disparities in Maternal Mortality

handle is hein.journals/nylr95 and id is 1228 raw text is: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW VOLUME 95 NOVEMBER 2020 NUMBER 5 ARTICLES RACIAL DISPARITIES IN MATERNAL MORTALITY KHIARA M. BRIDGES* 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 com- mentators 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 impor- tant 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. The analysis proceeds in four Parts. * Copyright © 2020 by Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law. I am grateful to Yuvraj Joshi, Rosie Loring, and Russell Robinson for reading and critiquing earlier drafts. Thanks are also owed to participants at faculty workshops at Emory University School of Law, Florida State University College of Law, and the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, who engaged so generously with this piece. Thanks also to Simone Lieban Levine and Hayley MacMillen for truly excep- tional research assistance. And thank you to mijn perfecte echtgenoot, Gert Reynaert, for breaking the love scale. All errors remain my own. 1229 Imaged with Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most