A mother’s tragic death after giving birth has sparked a necessary conversation about the risks black women face in the maternity ward. Charles Johnson, a California dad, is suing Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after his wife, Kira, passed away from complications following the delivery of their now 3-year-old son. Johnson says he did everything he could to alert the staff that something was wrong, but he was told his wife “wasn’t a priority.”
Johnson tells KTLA his wife delivered their son, Langston, via C-section, but soon after the birth, he knew something was wrong. “I can see the Foley catheter at Kira’s bedside beginning to turn pink with blood,” he recalls. “I just held her [a nurse] by her hands and said, ‘Please, look. My wife isn’t doing well.’ This woman looked me directly in my eye and said, ‘Sir, your wife just isn’t a priority right now.’”
What Johnson didn’t know is that his wife was bleeding internally. He tells KTLA she bled for almost 10 hours, as he begged the medical staff to check on her. “It wasn’t until 12:30 a.m. the next morning that they finally made the decision to take Kira back to surgery,” he says. “When she was taken back into surgery and opened up, they found 3.5 liters of blood in her abdomen.”
Johnson believes the U.S. is in the midst of a maternal mortality crisis that is “shameful on a global scale,” and he isn’t wrong. The rate of life-threatening complications for pregnant women and mothers in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past two decades, according to a report by NPR and ProPublica. Even more disturbing is the fact that women of color are being disproportionately affected. According to the Centers For Disease Control (CDC), black women, American Indian women and Alaska Native women are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.
Johnson’s story has fueled an outcry on Twitter, where a user shared news of his lawsuit and admitted she’s terrified to give birth as a black woman.
Other black women have taken to the thread to share stories of times their health concerns were ignored by doctors.
And many are encouraging black moms to seek care from midwives and doulas who can advocate for them during childbirth.
Tennis legend Serena Williams is, perhaps, one of the most well-known examples of a black mother whose health emergency was not taken seriously by medical professionals. In a profile for Vogue magazine, Williams says she suffered a pulmonary embolism following the birth of her daughter in 2011. Because she has a history of pulmonary embolisms, Williams immediately alerted a nurse that she was feeling short of breath and needed a CT scan and a dose of blood thinner right away.
Instead of sounding the alarm, the nurse reportedly “thought her pain medicine might be making her confused.” After a lot of pleading by Williams and an unnecessary Doppler scan to look for clots in her legs, she was finally sent for a CT scan, which revealed several small clots in her lungs. Williams was also found to have bleeding in her abdomen and had to spend six weeks on bed rest recovering from the ordeal.
Maternal deaths can sometimes be attributed to underlying health issues or pre-existing conditions, but the ProPublica report also cites medical errors and unequal access to medical care as main causes in the U.S. Every Mother Counts, an organization founded by supermodel Christy Turlington that works to improve maternal health around the globe, lists another root cause of maternal death as “discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, language, socio-economic or indigenous status.”
In a statement to KTLA, a Cedars-Sinai spokesperson said they can’t comment on the case of Kira Johnson due to privacy laws. While the case is pending, her husband is fighting to raise awareness and push for policy changes that hold medical professionals accountable. Ultimately, he says, he just wants to “send other mothers home with their precious babies.”
