I am standing at a podium in a room full of hundreds of people, giving a keynote on the Black maternal mortality crisis. I share data. I share stories.
I read aloud from the memoir of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved Black mother. “I had prayed for his death, but never so earnestly as I now prayed for his life; and my prayer was heard. Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.”
I try to do what I always try to do: center the numbers in love. I make clear that behind every data point is a family disrupted, a community diminished. Those mothers who died in childbirth the previous year were not coming home.
I scan the room as I speak — I always do. I look for engagement. I look for discomfort. I look for the person who is leaning in and the person who has gone somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere near the middle of the room, I notice a White male academic. Not because he seems uncomfortable. Not because he is disengaged. I notice him because I cannot get a read on him. He is listening — that much is clear. But what he is doing with what he hears, I cannot tell.
I finish my address and at the edge of the stage, a crowd gathers — colleagues wanting to connect, students hoping for a photo, practitioners with lingering questions. The energy is warm. Affirming. I look up from exchanging contact information with an audience member about a potential collaboration, and there he is. We make eye contact. I can see from his face that he has something to say. He has held it the entire time.
“Seven hundred is a small number,” he says.
He wasn’t being cruel. That’s what makes it worse. He was being clinical. He did the math. He divided 700 by 341 million. He arrived at a percentage so small it seemed to answer its own question. See? Manageable. Rare, even.
I have thought about that moment ever since. Not because he was wrong about the math. But because of what it revealed: that in a room where I had offered every entry point I knew — data, history, grief, love — one person still could not hold it. Could not, or would not, cross the distance between a number and a life.
I wondered: how many others in that room felt the same way but never said so out loud?
This weekend, the United States turns 250. Across this country, Americans are preparing to celebrate — parades, fireworks, speeches about freedom and progress and the long arc bending toward a more perfect union. Americans are being asked to reflect on how far we have come. I want to take that invitation seriously.
This anniversary year, Black women will die in childbirth at more than three times the rate of White women, from causes the CDC has told us are more than 80% preventable. We will hold awareness weeks. We will convene task forces. We will express concern in committee hearings. And then we will call it a small number and move on year after year, for 250 more years.
Black life not mattering is not a detour from the American story. This is the American story.
In 1995, 168 people died in Oklahoma City. We rewrote federal anti-terrorism law within months.
In 2001, 2,977 people died on a September morning. We reorganized the federal government. We launched two wars. We built an entire architecture of national security — the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act — around the premise that 2,977 deaths demanded an emergency response.
In 2012, 26 people died at Sandy Hook Elementary School and it became the defining moral crisis of a generation.
In 2024 — not a pandemic year, not a year of national crisis, just an ordinary American year — 649 women died of maternal causes in the United States. 649 American mothers. That, apparently, is a small number.
Of those 649, 212 were Black. Roughly a third.
The CDC’s most recent data tells us what this looks like in rates: 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births for Black women, 14.2 for white women. More than three times. For every White woman who dies bringing life into this world, more than three Black women die doing the same thing — in the same country, in the same year, with the same preventable causes on the death certificate. Year after year, in crisis and in calm, the ratio holds.
No one gets to call that small.
It is 212 infants who will grow up without their mothers. It is 212 partners left to grieve and parent alone. It is 212 communities missing a teacher, a neighbor, a daughter, a friend. It is 212 ruptures. And those ruptures compound across generations in ways no spreadsheet can capture.
The “smallness” of the number is not a mathematical conclusion. It is a moral one. And someone made it.
Every single one of us arrived in this world through a mother’s body, was kept alive by a mother’s labor, was shaped — for better or worse, in presence or in absence — by what mothering we received or were denied.
Motherhood is the one universal constant. It crosses race. It crosses class. It crosses every line we have drawn between ourselves. Not one person reading these words came into being any other way.
The Yoruba concept of Ìyá holds the mother as the foundation of all life, all community, all spiritual order — to dishonor a mother is to destabilize the world itself. Slavery weaponized that knowledge. The forced separation of enslaved mothers from their babies was not incidental to the institution. It was central to it.
Harriet Jacobs laid bare the particular anguish of a mother who cannot protect her children — who loves them and is systematically denied the right to act on that love. The passage I read that evening was not chosen for shock. It was chosen because it refuses to be historical. It is contemporary. It is now.
America has never been shy about its reverence for motherhood.
“Mom and apple pie” is shorthand for everything this country claims to hold sacred. Motherhood is invoked by every political party, every campaign, every flag-waving moment of national self-congratulation. We built federal programs — WIC, Head Start, the Family and Medical Leave Act — on the explicit premise that supporting mothers is a national investment. We have a holiday. We spend billions on it. We write the cards. We say she is irreplaceable.
After the American Revolution, the ideology of Republican Motherhood held that democracy itself depended on mothers raising virtuous citizens. “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” became a national aphorism. Mothers weren’t just important. They were constitutive of the American project.
For Americans who identify as Christian, the theological weight is equally clear. The fifth commandment: honor thy mother. The biblical Rachel weeping for her children. The Virgin Mary as the highest human vessel. Across virtually every American religious tradition, motherhood carries sacred weight.
And yet.
You have built a civilization on the sanctity of motherhood. You have written it into your poetry and your legislation, your theology and your commerce. You have declared, in a hundred different ways, that mothers are sacred.
And then you have watched Black mothers die.
At 250 years, a nation’s character is not measured by its intentions. It is not measured by its founding documents or its holiday speeches or the feeling in your chest when the fireworks go up. It is measured by what it has nurtured and, conversely, by what it has forsaken. By whom it has decided can die in the shadows. By which mothers it has determined are worth saving.
America has had 250 years to answer that question. The maternal mortality data is the answer.
When a system repeatedly fails Black mothers and nothing changes — when the data accumulates, when the researchers publish, when the advocates testify and still the deaths mount — that is not negligence.
That is policy by practice.
I have built my life’s work around a single belief: that every person deserves to mother, and to be mothered, in the fullness of what that means. That belief does not have a racial qualifier. It never did.
As America raises a glass to 250 years of itself, I am asking every American to hold one question:
Not whether Black maternal mortality is a tragedy. But why we have decided it is a tragedy we can live with.
Dr. Rachel Hardeman is Reproductive Correspondent for The Emancipator. She is also a reproductive health equity researcher, public intellectual, founder of Beyond, LLC, and was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2024. Her work centers reproductive justice, structural racism, and the possibility of health systems rooted in dignity and love.