The US is failing Black mothers and babies. A lawsuit wants to keep it that way.

Is preventing the deaths of Black mothers and babies compelling? In a recent lawsuit, a conservative legal organization answers this question with a brutal “no.”  

Jimenez v. Pan is a challenge to California’s Black Infant Health program, which describes itself as focusing “exclusively on empowering Black/African American women by connecting them with the vital care and support needed to promote healthy behaviors during pregnancy.”

The program responds to the fact that Black people are more than three times more likely than white people to die from a pregnancy-related cause, and Black babies die at twice the rate of white babies.

Some observers are inclined to blame Black people for these statistics, oftentimes suggesting that Black people have race-specific genetic variations that predispose them to all manner of death. However, the weight of the science does not support this view. The higher rates of Black maternal and infant deaths are not a function of Black people’s race-specific biology, but rather society.

Research suggests that if our efforts to combat racial disparities in health ignore race, they will fail.

Scholars have generated a body of literature exploring the efficacy of racially concordant care — patient-provider relationships in which the parties share racial identities. While the studies constituting this literature do not demonstrate that racially concordant care universally improves outcomes for patients, there are a number of studies that provide persuasive proof that in some contexts, Black patients will do better if they receive their care from Black doctors.  

Perhaps the most disturbing of these studies examined the outcomes of Black babies who had been hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit in Florida.........

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