Built for Our Survival: Reclaiming Black Birth from a History of Harm

This brief is the first in the Birthing While Black: The Urgent Fight for Maternal Health Reform Series by IWPR. Throughout this series, we will tell the story of how we got here: What are the roots of our health and economic systems? Why have they evolved in ways that have continually harmed Black women and are increasingly bad for all of us?

The series will examine different dimensions of the Black maternal health crisis, including the labor market segregation of health care workers, data collection on maternal health outcomes, and links between the maternal health crisis and the proliferation of reproductive health restrictions. In this first brief, we begin with the history of our economic and health systems, link maternal health to IWPR’s existing work on economic and health issues that uniquely impact the lives of Black women, and lay the groundwork for our forthcoming work on this topic.