11/18/2025
🖤 Black women are not being overdramatic. We are being ignored. And it’s killing us.
This week alone, we’ve seen two viral videos of Black women in active labor, loud, in pain, begging, crying for help, and being dismissed like their suffering didn’t matter.
And this isn’t new. This is the system working exactly as it was built.
Here’s what the data makes painfully clear:
📌 Black women in the U.S. are 3 to 4 times more likely to die during pregnancy, birth, or postpartum than white women.
📌 Even with higher income and education, Black women still face higher mortality rates.
📌 Bias is so deeply rooted in healthcare that our real, loud, visible pain is often dismissed as “exaggeration” or “noncompliance.”
This is why moments like these videos matter. Because people keep saying, “It can’t be that bad.” But it is. We are watching Black women be ignored on camera in 2025, and if that is what happens while being filmed, imagine what happens when nobody is watching.
As a doula, I am telling you this from the deepest part of my soul:
🖤 Your voice matters.
🖤 Your pain is real.
🖤 You deserve to be believed the first time.
🖤 You deserve care that protects your life, not care that gambles with it.
We need systemic change.
We need accountability.
We need more Black birth workers.
We need hospitals to confront their bias instead of hiding behind procedure.
We need everyone in the room to understand that listening saves lives.
