I’m a Friendship, Wisconsin woman who works part-time at Walmart without insurance on the family. I read Tatyana Ali’s story and felt every word of it.

This country loves to talk about mothers. The forced-birth caucus loves to talk about mothers — until you ask them to actually pay for a delivery room.

Tatyana Ali walked into a hospital to have a baby and got held down by four people while a doctor used a procedure that is almost never used because it’s a last resort. She calls it obstetric violence. I call it what it is when a system treats Black women like meat.

The numbers behind her story:

  • 649 women in this country died from maternal causes in 2024.
  • Black mothers are more than three times as likely to die than white ones. Three fucking times.
  • More than 500 hospitals closed their maternity wards between 2010 and 2022.
  • More than half of US counties don’t have a hospital that delivers babies. They’re called ‘maternity care deserts’ like that’s a weather event and not a policy choice.
  • Nearly 40% of counties in the South are deserts. The ‘pro-life’ South. The place that will ban your abortion and then send you two counties over to find a bed.

And MedStar Washington Hospital Center — a teaching hospital in the nation’s capital — just closed one of its two postpartum units citing ‘financial pressure.’ Financial fucking pressure. So they kept the ward open until the dollars ran out and the women ran out of luck.

Some states have laws making it harder for midwives to practice. Some states have Medicaid and private-insurance reimbursement rates so low no midwife can make a living. Some states are run by red-state ransom artists who call themselves ‘pro-life’ and then close the wards that make life possible.

There’s a dangerous misconception in medicine that Black patients have a higher threshold for pain. A doctor with that in their head, looking at a Black woman screaming, is not seeing a patient in distress. She’s seeing noise.

Family values, my ass. You cannot call yourself pro-life when your system kills mothers at three times the rate. Don’t tell me about the babies when the people having them can’t get through it alive. And don’t tell me about personal responsibility when the hospital closed and the nearest ward is an hour and a half down a county road that the township won’t blacktop.

Source story: Tatyana Ali turns 2016 delivery into Black, Indigenous health advocacy.