“Dozens of maternal health organizations and advocates are urging the California surgeon general to suspend the rollout of a plan aimed at reducing maternal mortality, saying that the recently announced initiative won’t effectively address the crisis and “risks exacerbating existing inequities.”

In a letter shared with The Times, representatives of organizations including the California Black Women’s Health Project, Black Women for Wellness and the California Nurse-Midwives Assn. faulted the plan for “placing undue burden on individuals” and failing to “explicitly name and address racism as a root cause of maternal health inequities.”

The California Maternal Health Blueprint unveiled in September sets out strategies to try to bring down maternal deaths. Among them: Getting Californians of child-bearing age to fill out a new questionnaire to assess their risk of pregnancy complications, even before they become pregnant.

In their Oct. 21 letter to state surgeon general Dr. Diana Ramos, the advocacy groups said that the maternal health blueprint acknowledged racial inequities in maternal mortality rates, but didn’t “ground these disparities in the evidence showing systemic racism as the driving factor.”

Black women have suffered a maternal mortality rate more than three times that of white women in California, state data show. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has faulted many factors, including differences in healthcare and underlying chronic conditions as well as structural racism and implicit bias.

Studies have shown disparities exist even for Black women who are affluent, spurring maternal health researchers to increasingly focus on racial inequities in healthcare, bias and discrimination experienced by patients, and the physical effects of chronic stress from enduring racism over time.

The Maternal Health Blueprint sets a goal of having at least 50% of “reproductive age individuals” across the state complete a questionnaire on their risk of pregnancy complications by December 2026.

In the letter objecting to the plan, the coalition of groups said that calling for people to fill out such a questionnaire “gives the impression of personal fault and/or that individual behavior is to blame, burdening the user and discrediting the system’s role in creating this crisis.”

Dana Sherrod, cofounder and executive director of the California Coalition for Black Birth Justice, said that “by omitting the mention of systemic racism, it is putting the blame back onto patients.” The only time the phrase “systemic racism” appears in the blueprint is in reference to the findings of another state report.

Sherrod said that even when accounting for other factors, “Black women still have worse outcomes.” For instance, one analysis of maternal deaths in California found that Black mothers with the highest incomes had worse rates of pregnancy-related mortality than white mothers with the lowest incomes.

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Health groups call for suspending state plan on maternal deaths, saying it burdens patients / Los Angeles Times

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