When I attended my first Birth Doula training in Baton Rouge in 2010, I imagined the celebrations of new life that would soon enrich my own. Baby showers, blessingways, naming ceremonies, brises—community rituals where those who have given birth and parented envelop the new parent in tales of strong birth experiences, crafty parents, and their cunning, healthy children. Indeed, I have attended many of these rituals over the last 12 years. But what I could not yet imagine, back then, were the death stories. For the past four years, I have been listening to the stories of those who do not survive to tell their own tale.
In 2018, I received an e-mail inviting me to serve as a volunteer member of Louisiana’s newly revitalized Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC). The CDC defines MMRCs as multidisciplinary teams at the state and local level that “perform comprehensive reviews of deaths among women within a year of the end of pregnancy.” The primary goals of these committees are to review maternal deaths and to “identify prevention opportunities.”
As a birth justice advocate, I knew this work could be meaningful. In Louisiana, we suffer from one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the United States—itself the nation with the worst maternal death rate in the entire developed world. The overall rate of pregnancy-associated deaths in Louisiana was 92.5 deaths per
— source thenation.com | Latona Giwa | Apr 12, 2022