🌿 You Cannot Fight for Black Maternal Health While Erasing Black Women

We cannot protect what we refuse to name.

And we cannot save Black women’s lives while allowing the world to blur, dilute, or silence the very people most affected.

These two realities cannot coexist.

Because every kind of erasure — historical, medical, linguistic, statistical, spiritual — weakens the ground we stand on when we fight for dignity, protection, and life-saving care.

Here’s why:

And without that data, institutions feel safe saying:

• “We don’t see a problem.”

• “We don’t see racial disparities.”

• “The outcomes aren’t that different.”

But these claims fall apart the moment you look at the work of Dr. Joia Crear-Perry of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, who has documented for years that Black women’s maternal deaths are not only higher—they are preventable.

They fall apart when you read Dr. Monica McLemore, who shows that the disparities remain even among healthy, educated, insured Black women.

They fall apart when you hear Serena Williams, nearly dying in childbirth despite wealth, fame, and access, say plainly: “No one was listening to me.”

They fall apart when you look at CDC data showing Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women — a statistic repeated by:

• The CDC

• The National Institutes of Health

• The Black Mamas Matter Alliance

• The March of Dimes

So no — the outcomes aren’t the same.
They never have been.

We feel the difference in our bodies.
We see the difference in our families.
And we carry the difference in our grief.

⭐ 2. Erasure removes accountability.

If the system can pretend Black women aren’t being harmed,
then the system can also pretend no one is responsible.

But naming who is harmed is the first step toward
naming who must change.

Accountability begins with clarity.

⭐ 3. Erasure removes urgency.

When Black women’s deaths are buried under “general maternal outcomes,”
the crisis becomes invisible.

Invisible crises do not get funding.
They do not get policy change.
They do not get the respect needed to make institutions move.

Urgency disappears when the people in danger are erased.

⭐ 4. Erasure removes cultural wisdom.

Black women have always carried knowledge about birth —
the rituals, the bonding, the care, the postpartum watching-over,
the ways our mothers and grandmothers knew how to hold life and heal it.

When we erase Black women, we erase the lineage that could save lives today.

We lose:

• midwives

• doulas

• storytellers

• birth workers

• aunties

• the cultural memory that has always kept us alive

Doulas and midwives — especially historically Black midwives — were rooted in:

• relational care

• cultural knowledge

• continuity

• trust

• staying with the mother

• attending to the whole body

• honoring both spirit and science

• respecting the mother’s voice

They cared for women long before the medical system took over childbirth.

Erasure steals wisdom from the future.

⭐ 5. Erasure removes the right to be heard.

When our language, our boundaries, our sex-based realities,
our medical pain, and our survival experiences are rewritten or dismissed,
advocacy becomes a hollow echo.

We end up fighting for an issue
without being allowed to say who is suffering.

Advocacy cannot survive in a space where truth is not permitted.

⭐ 6. Black maternal health requires visibility — not dilution.

When we name Black women,
we’re not excluding anyone.
We’re protecting the group most endangered.

Clarity is not divisive.
Clarity is life-saving.

When we lose clarity,
we lose focus.
And when we lose focus,
Black women die.

This is not symbolic.
This is not theoretical.
This is life and death for our daughters, sisters, aunties, mothers, and friends.

🌿 We cannot fight for Black maternal health if our society allows Black women to disappear.

Visibility is light for life.
Naming is light for life.
Truth is light for life.