During her pregnancy with her son Milan, she remembers sitting with a pain that did not feel normal. It was sharp, persistent, and unsettling in a way she could not ignore. As a former labor and delivery nurse, she understood the risks in a way many patients do not. She knew what to watch for. She knew her history. She knew when something felt wrong. Yet when she raised her concerns, they were not met with the urgency they deserved.
At the time of her pregnancy with Milan, she had already experienced a high-risk pregnancy and an emergency C-section during a previous medical journey. She knew that a vertical incision on her uterus could put any future pregnancy at serious risk. She spoke up. She asked questions. She paid close attention to every signal her body sent. Still, when she experienced a uterine rupture, she found herself navigating a medical system that failed to respond with the level of care and urgency that the critical moment required.
This sobering reality raises a profound and troubling question: If someone with years of professional labor and delivery experience can recognize the warning signs, actively advocate for herself, and still be failed by the healthcare infrastructure, what happens to women with less information, fewer financial resources, or less confidence that they will be heard and protected by their doctors?
Conversations during Black Maternal Health Week consistently center around one urgent, undeniable truth: Black women are still far more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes in the United States than white women. This is not a casual assumption or a localized anomaly; it is a thoroughly documented fact, and it is a statistic that should stop society in its tracks. Furthermore, this crisis does not exclusively impact one socioeconomic group or educational background. It affects everyone, including some of the most visible, successful, and well-resourced women in the world.
As the founder of Mielle, her mission has always been centered on empowering women, particularly Black women, to express their authentic selves. At its core, that mission is about care, bodily agency, and visibility, which is why national conversations around maternal health matter so deeply. It is about showing up for every single facet of the Black women’s healthcare experience. Society needs to talk much more candidly about what happens to Black women who survive the devastating trauma of a miscarriage or stillbirth, as well as the prolonged, often overlooked mental health challenges that can follow, including severe postpartum depression and anxiety.
For generations, Black women have been expected to remain strong while navigating profound medical emergencies and systemic hurdles. They are routinely dismissed, told to wait patiently, advised to calm down, and urged to blindly trust a medical establishment that has historically failed to earn that trust. They survive medical experiences that change their families and themselves forever. And then, far too often, they are expected to do something just as impossible: keep going as if mere survival is the end of the story. It is not.
That is precisely why Black Maternal Health Week cannot and should not be about mortality rates alone. It must also be about what it means to live, breathe, and cope after enduring trauma, preventable harm, and profound loss that completely reshapes an individual’s life.
The empirical data makes it abundantly clear that this public health crisis is ongoing and worsening. Black women are about three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, and more than 80 percent of those tragic deaths are considered entirely preventable by health experts. Additionally, Black infants die at more than twice the rate of white infants. These are not random gaps or statistical anomalies. They reflect a deeply flawed healthcare system and a broader societal culture that too often normalizes Black women’s physical pain and emotional distress instead of responding to it with swift, compassionate care.
Recent research shows that roughly one in five women, or about 20 percent, report experiencing mistreatment during maternity care. However, for Black women, that figure climbs dramatically to nearly 30 percent, reflecting much more frequent encounters with racial bias, overt disrespect, and a fundamental lack of bodily autonomy in clinical settings. Nearly half of all surveyed women admit they have held back from asking necessary questions or sharing critical concerns with their physicians. In one of the single most vulnerable moments of a human being’s life, far too many patients are already calculating whether speaking up about their pain will make their treatment worse.
Black mothers deserve more than survival
In her own personal life, grief did not arrive quietly or neatly. It entered her marriage, her motherhood, her physical body, her spiritual faith, and eventually her professional work. In her book, The Glory In Your Story, she writes extensively about how grief does not follow a neat timeline or an easy trajectory. It becomes an enduring part of who you are, and true healing begins not by trying to outrun the pain, but by honestly acknowledging its presence.
That reality matters deeply because so many Black women are publicly praised for being strong when what they actually need is the safe space to be human, vulnerable, and imperfect. After losing Milan, she returned to work. She kept moving forward. She built Mielle into a major enterprise. From the outside looking in, it can easily look like a classic story of triumph and resilience. And in many respects, it is. But society must be completely honest about the lessons it takes away from stories like hers.
The primary lesson should never be that Black women are uniquely equipped to carry devastating, life-altering grief and still perform at an elite professional level. It should not be that cultural resilience makes systemic medical failures acceptable or excusable. And it should not mean that women have to turn their personal survival into something marketable or productive just to make their pain legible and worthy of attention.
Too often, society rushes to celebrate the comeback story without ever sitting long enough with the systemic conditions and institutional failures that made that grueling comeback necessary in the first place.
Faith carried her through the darkest hours. Purpose helped her slowly rebuild her life. But none of those personal coping mechanisms change the fundamental reality that more attentive listening, better clinical care, stronger hospital accountability systems, and a much greater sense of medical urgency might have completely changed her personal story. If the medical community and the public are truly serious about reforming maternal health, they have to be just as serious about stating those facts clearly and without hesitation.
Black Maternal Health Week gives the public an invaluable opportunity to think much more broadly about what true healthcare justice looks like. It looks like hospital wards that are fully equipped for emergency interventions. It looks like medical providers who listen to Black women the very first time they speak, without requiring patients to fight an uphill battle just to be believed. It looks like comprehensive mental and emotional support for families long after a loss has occurred—not just during the acute phase of a crisis. And it looks like making genuine space for grief without prematurely expecting Black women to turn their trauma into public inspiration before they are emotionally ready to do so.
It is well past time that society honors not only the women who have tragically been lost to this crisis, but also the women who are still here, carrying the heavy burdens that the medical system could not or would not hold for them. Survival should never be treated as the finish line of healthcare. Being truly heard, protected, and cared for is what every mother deserves.
