Welcome to the nonprofits. Today, we're going to talk about a very disturbing case that highlights the intersection of race and reproductive health. AJ, what do you have for us today?
We are discussing a deeply troubling case that underscores the complexities of reproductive rights and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes. And Mary Marriage is a twenty three year old black woman from South Carolina. She finds herself facing murder charges after the tragic loss of her pregnancy in March twenty twenty three. Following a visit to the hospital for severe pain, she gave birth to her baby in a badroom toilet and was later accused of failing to provide aid to
her infant. This case raises critical questions about the implications of restrictive reproductive laws and their disproportionate impact on marginalised communities. As we explore her ordeal and the Brothers Society or indications, we invite you to consider how these reflects on our healthcare system and the urgent need for compassion and understanding
and discussions about pregnancy and loss. This story is from The Atlanta Brackstar by Jill Jordan Cider on September twenty four, twenty twenty four.
Thanks a J. Now I know that one of the people involved in this said this had nothing to do with the overturning of Roe v Wade, completely unrelated. These are not the droids you see kind of mentality is what it felt like to me, and not trying to make light of this situation because what happened to this woman is a nightmare. But what do you think, aj, Do you think that this had something to do with
Roe v Wade being overturned? Are we seeing a new focus in new ways or do you think that we're just I'm just wrong in thinking that.
No, you're you're right. I mean, the biggest issue with abortion bands is that it doesn't prevent abortions. Ali does is cause more deaths, or it brings more charges to desperate women who are full to seek medical care after a miscarriagh thinking that they're going to be charged. It leads to women finding dangerous and unsafe methods to deal with unwanted pregnancies. So this is why rodbi Wade was
so monumental and important. It provided protections for women to safely seek medical care related to pregnancy and other reproductive care right. It gave a place for them to have a safe, apportioned choices because it comes down to body autonomy. It's a choice that women need to be able to make. And in this case, while marsh still has her life, it has been turned upside down. She was detained parmas a month, she faced murder charges. It disrupted her vucation.
They put her through more trauma than she could have imagined. All that, on top of the loss of her baby, is unthinkable that in this day and age, we still have to hear about these kind of stories, and it's all thanks to the overturning of ov Wait.
I think you're probably right. I think that we're seeing a new focus because we've opened the can of worms. You know, here in Texas we got people wanting to make it illegal to use Texas highways to go to an abortion clinic. And all these absolutely, ultimately are unenforceable things. But it also leads to situations where, or at least
we hope, are unenforceable. But it also leads to the situations where we have people who like this one who it seemed like when they interviewed her immediately they already knew that she are suspected. They were told, whether true or not, that she had been to a planned parenthood months before, and I just found that incredibly invasive. You know, it's like we're taking miscarriage and making every miscarriage in the planet an act of a suspicious act.
What do you think, Carol, Yes, I found that particularly troubling too. It's essentially almost trying to extend in practice, if not in law, these prohibitions and bands on abortion, to then include miscarriages as well, because where do you draw the line between the two. You know, there's many many pregnancies will naturally end in termination, whether it's spontaneous just because the body, you know, it doesn't work out. But now we're criminalizing people who are trying to carry
babies to term or carry a pregnancy to term. Sorry I misspoke there. They wanted to have a baby, and yet now even in those instances, if they don't produce a child successfully, we're criminalizing that almost as if it's the same as getting an abortion, except we're not making any effort to contribute to things like I don't know, providing comprehensive prenatal care at an affordable cost that will
help people have healthy pregnancies. I mean, I don't know, shocking that that would, you know, matter, And that's exactly the problem I think that we're encountering here too. This was someone who it sounded like didn't have access to a lot of things that could have contributed to having a more successful pregnancy experience. We don't know what the person encountered at planned parenthood or what was going on, but we do know that it sounded like this person
was not terribly informed about what was going on. We know that they tried to go to the hospital and were not able to receive care. We know that they did not have a lot of knowledge about the process. And you know, what we're seeing is that now we're criminalizing being I guess, less informed, having less access to care, to money, to financial resources that would help you be able to have better health outcomes. And this is where
it gets to the racial disparity that you mentioned. You know, we people don't like to think that these kind of disparities exist, but they do. Black women in particular, which is what happened in this case, tends to be not only criminalized in many things that they're doing, but also
treated unfairly and unequally in healthcare settings. And again we see that in this case, we know, according to the CDC, that black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy related cause than white women, and this is due to factors like disparities in the quality of healthcare that they're receiving in underlying chronic conditions that may be related to their experience of financial instability, structural racism, and all of these other things, as well as implicit
biases that they encounter when they enter the healthcare setting and the law enforcement setting when they're being criminalized for these things. And so they're all related to one another. And this criminalization of not just abortion, but now even just the pregnancy outcomes themselves, whether they were intentional or not, is simply exacerbating these disparities that have already existed all this time. And it's hard to not see that as
an intentional outcome in some cases. I hate to be pessimistic about people's motivations for promoting these abortion bands, but it's hard to miss the disparities.
Glad you brought up the expectations of pregnancy outcomes, right, because the more we cover these cases of women's reproductive rights by the autonomy abortion and pregnancy laws. The more I am convinced that the people enacting these rules, which more often than not people that don't even have an uters and shouldn't be managing them, have incredibly unrealistic expectations.
They expect every single woman to have a perfectly healthy pregnancy with zero complications, to you know, become pregnant under the perfect circumstances marriage while in love, you know, like obviously marriage to a matter. Yeah, yeah, that's because what else side, and then to give birth to a healthy baby every single time. And in this there is no room for anything else in their minds. These laws go
beyond abortion. They focus so much on saving the lives of and unviable fetos that they completely ignore the fact that there are suggesting laws that border on torture and abuse of women. So it seemsact for women in America, pregnancy has become a threat. And it's not even from the pregnancy itself. It's from society, because you become a criminal if anything goes wrong with your pregnancy.
Yeah, I have to say that. I wish I could say that you were just getting ahead of yourself and making a big to do about nothing, because that's often what we hear on these type of issues. Oh, you're just blowing smoke, this is there's nothing here. But hopefully most of us have learned by now with with Dobbs that this isn't blowing smoke because these people are directly signaling what they're wanting to do. We look at Paxton here in Texas, who wants to get an idea of
make a database essentially off who's pregnant. There's a reason why they want that information because, like you said, if it's it's a healthy pregnancy, or it's an act of suspicion, and that's that's very dangerous. But going back to something care that you said, when yeah, if we want healthy, if we want to have healthy pregnancies, let's start with
universal health care. Let's talk about you know, good prenatal let's talk about and if we want talk about pro life, we're going to talk about a whole lot of things far beyond just pregnancy. But yeah, let's let's start there. But it seems that these same people in these same
states time again don't want to address those issues. They want to address this, Well, let's make sure that abortion stops, And yes, I think it's insane to believe that anyone who thinks that Roe v. Wades overturning did not impact this needs needs to pay attention. You're just not paying attention. But one thing Carol wanted to ask you about. You mentioned some of these problems that I just discussed. What are we seeing as far as in these states where
we're seeing the tightening of Roe v. Wade laws. What are we seeing as far as that mortality rate? Are we seeing that being impacted for both mothers and for mortality rate of infants themselves. Are we seeing anything like that?
Yes, I believe we are, and I don't have the exact statistics on this. I think it's going to take a little bit of time to see a trend develop. But this is not the first instance of a case
that we've heard of like this. If you read articles on any major news source that's following this issue, you'll see example after example of someone whose life was tragically lost as a result of not being able to access care that they needed, either because they were having a miscarriage and they were not able to receive care because the doctors were afraid that they would be in some
kind of legal trouble for intervening. You're seeing people who are children, young girls that are now carrying pregnancies to term, and now their life trajectory, their health is massively impacted.
We're seeing people who are surviving complications to pregnancies, maybe in some cases surviving in other cases not that are due to chronic health conditions that they knew in advance were going to be incompatible with a healthy, successful pregnancy, and yet they were stuck putting their bodies through that and putting their lives at risk for no good reason. So, yes, we've seen this happen, and we've seen the results begin
to appear before our eyes. I know recently there was a certain political candidate made some kind of statements such as, oh, you know, where are these people that are these women that are supposedly, you know, showing up to emergency rooms and bleeding out in the parking lot. Well, sure enough, we can point to several examples of that happening recently where someone has not been able to access the care that they needed while they were having a miscarriage or
some sort of pregnancy related life threatening issue. This is a real thing that's happening to people, regardless of whether some want to pay attention to it or not or say oh, well these are rare, Well, okay, those are people that that's happening to. Those count and we don't need to be having any of those cases occur, and yet here we are.
Yeah, I'd love to say that there's no secret that you know, women of color have a much had a rate of maternal mortality or death related to pregnancy and childhood, and that clearly studies have shown that black women are more likely to experience life threatening conditions like you say, briefs in conditions, but even preclamcy or powder memorrhation, blood cloths. But there was also complications with the babies, as you men, as you asked that question, and I think that I
did hear some statistics on that. There was a study It wasn't national, but it was a study in California that showed that even when a black mother was in a highre financial position, their death rates were incredibly highreds out of one hundred thousand birds, one one hundred and seventy three of the baby is born to the richest white mothers died before the first birthday. Whereas four hundred and thirty seven babies born to the richest black mothers died,
So that's that number is just incredibly higher. And then black babies have the highest mortality rate in all of America. And this is just for black women only. It doesn't include any other people of color, not Hispanic or anything like that. And so there is there seems to be a huge bias against black women specifically. And this makes me wonder also if in this case this could have played a role on why marsh was sent home from the hospital in the first place after going in for pain.
Could this entire or they old have been prevented if she had been given better medical care that wasn't biased against her race.
I think that when I was reading the article, I want to say they use the term approximate cause for her being labeled as the cause of this death. And I are going to get in the debate over childhood on this and the reason am is the mother retained the ashes. So for their sake, if they want to call them a child, it's a child for the sake of a discussion and because that's what it meant to them. But when it comes down to South Carolina and their
need to assert a blame somewhere. There's definitely blame. I mean, as you said, Aja, coming home, this woman coming home from the hospital, she was completely dismissed. And I can't help but wonder if she would have been a white woman, would she have gotten the same dismissal. The statistics say maybe,
maybe not because we see them too. But the bottom line is it's hard to ignore that a black woman's two point five times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth, and that with that number rising, So yes, there's plenty to blame, blame to lay around. And you know, as I mentioned, I believe carod to you before this show started. You know, driving while black is a thing, and it's bad enough right now, it seems we need to deal with pregnant while black too, because this isn't
something that's going to go away. But I have to wonder if this isn't something that is specific to a general dismissal women, because that's a lot of what this tends to be is it just seems to be putting them in a second class place. What do you think, Kara, Oh, one.
Hundred percent agree. I know we've talked on this show previously about all of the ways that going to a hospital or a doctor while being a woman is a dangerous endeavor or one in which you're more likely to be ignored or dismissed or labeled as having a mental health issue for thinking that you have a physical health issue, and all of these kinds of things, and then combined with being a woman and also a woman who is black, now we've got two different intersecting ways in which you're
going to be treated in a different way than other people who are coming into this setting. And that is
reflected in the outcomes. It's reflected in the maternal health of black women, it's reflected in the health outcomes of women in general going into a medical facility, their outcomes in terms of how long it takes them to get diagnosed with things, how much research has been devoted to the types of issues that women have specifically, all of these issues are combining, and when you look at this in a larger context with many of the other laws that we have on the books, or have in the
past had on the books that disproportionately affect certain groups of people, it's hard to not see the pattern when you see these abortion laws happening in states that also have a history of having laws that are going to restrict people from voting, and those laws tend to restrict certain demographics from being able to vote, the same states that have had certain ordinances and laws on the books that have caused disproportionate disadvantages to accrue to people of
certain socioeconomic and racial categories in terms of their access to even be near a hospital, or have transportation to a hospital, or access to any other kind of thing that people might need. These are just piling one on top of the other and compounding these problems, and it's having the same effect. Again, I don't think it's a surprising effect. I think anyone who is paying attention knew this would be the outcome of this, and here we are seeing it. And I don't think that it was
an unintended outcome. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but that's what I see.
Aj Anything you had ad You have mentioned this before, Infidel, but I think it, Parson be Bitn. If men were able to get pregnant, we will be having a completely different conversation.
I don't disagree, and I've said that if men got pregnant and I use that term directly, but I would say that the birth control pill would have been invented before the wheel, you know, that'd have been the first thing. And we'd have a lottery every year, and whoever lost would have the kid that year. So we'd have about one hundred people and just barely holding on to survival. So I completely agree what truth is is that we'd have, you know, make abortion clinics are around, because it just
wouldn't be this way. But I will say that I do agree. I'm a little pessimistic, like you, Kara. I think this is a deliberate I don't think this is accidental. I think this has opened a lot of people's eyes because they used to say, oh, this is just one of many, and this doesn't really happen. This is just excuses you use for what could happen if we made
abortion illegal. Well now we're seeing those and they're very real consequences, and they count and they matter because as rare or not, they're people behind them.