Ethnic disparities in maternal care

Black and ethnic minority women are paying with their lives for the lack of action on racial bias, reports Lilian Anekwe Maternal health—or lack of it—is one of the starkest examples of racial health inequalities in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Work in the UK by University of Oxford researchers found that between 2014 and 2016 the rate of maternal death in pregnancy was 8 in 100 000 white women, compared with 15 in 100 000 Asian women and 40 in 100 000 black women (box 1).1 It’s a similar picture in the US, where African-American, Native American, and Alaska native women die of pregnancy related causes at a rate three times that of white women, according to a May 2019 report by the Centers for Disease Control.2 Box 1 ### Problems in maternal careRETURN TO TEXT