In an article in the Charlotte Post, Keisha Bentley-Edwards, PhD, co-director of the CTSI Center for Equity in Research, discusses how the U.S. maternal mortality gap can be traced to slavery-era medical exploitation of enslaved African women.
The article, which was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, features Bentley-Edwards’s expertise about the dire results of “racialized myths” that formed a basis of medical professional training for generations.
“You have to consider the history and the context that the medical profession has been trained in over generations, and a lot of it is rooted in these racialized myths about Black people, especially with this idea of race as biology rather than race as a social construct,” Bentley-Edwards told the Charlotte Post. “So, with that, you can look at J. Marion Sims and his decision not to provide appropriate anesthesia to enslaved women [during surgery] along with Black people being perceived as not experiencing pain in normal ways that can be connected to treatment.”
Today, Black women are up to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy- and birth-related complications than their white counterparts.
Bentley-Edwards is an associate professor of medicine and a developmental psychologist who uses a cultural lens to understand social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Her work specifically examines how race, culture, and racism stress influence how the world responds to Black Americans and how this influences health and social disparities.
Read the article and learn more about the Center for Equity in Research.