The Daily Beast Podcast - Inside the Maternal Morbidity Crisis Facing Black Women

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

Aftershock directors Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt talk to Molly Jong-Fast about why Black women are more likely to die than their white counterparts after giving birth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special show, but we're going to talk to the directors of the documentary Aftershock, who are Paula Elzel and Tanya Lewis Lee.

This documentary shines a light on the world of gynecology, which is a world that has a long-standing history of exploiting and neglecting black women in America, and we're going to talk all. about that. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Yes, clips, clip me. There we are. Clippy, my fave. Yeah, I love Clippy. Who doesn't look clippy? We had a late, late entry that I'm really happy we got. Oh, it's really good. I mean, and by good, I mean bad. Yes, because we know Bolly's soon could be without her favorite Congressman, and Louis Gomer come January. So he has some thoughts on Google's preferential treatment and how they're treating some of his favorite podcaster, YouTube streamer, thingabobbers.

It's time to get rid of their immunity from liability for even fraud. You can't even sue them for fraud. I'm like Diamond and Silk. They were telling me how they had paid in order to have their name come up more often. And not only did it not come up more often, an algorithm was used to send it to the bottom. That's called fraud. They took money from them under fraudulent circumstance.

They can't even sue over that. So I'm for getting rid of that immunity. I would like to hear an entire podcast that is just Louis talking about his good friends, Diamond and Silk. What do you think they talk about at dinner? I don't know. I think having dinner with Louis is. like that scene in Hannibal when Ray Leota's brain was being removed piece by piece?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. He's asking you to not cast aspersions on his as asparagus. His teeth are falling out, like at that speech. Listen, I just want to point out again, Louis Gomer is a lawyer and was a judge. Okay? He went to law school. So the fact that he doesn't understand what frauds,

is, first of all, just let's, I want to unpack this for a minute. Can you pay to be a higher Google result? Yes. Okay. So do we think that that is actually what happened with Diamond and Silk or do you think, no, right? Right. No. I think whatever he said is not what happened. Just in general. I mean, I did realize, Molly, your birthday. is coming up, maybe we could find a birthday dinner with Louie. Yeah. Birthday dinner with Louis contest. What if I try to inception that into the world? Yeah, you got to.

Okay, I'm on it. I'm on it. Okay, one Ms. Kelly Ann Conway has some thoughts about, you know, the way presidents get treated fairly and, you know, who's doing executive orders and who's not. So, Sean, this is what's fascinating. if the president actually takes executive action as he is threatening to do, people should know what that means.

It means that he has subverted the process of our elected representatives who are put there by the people. And instead, an unpopular president is basically acting alone. And it comes with tons of money that he can repurpose for these climate reasons that the vast, vast majority of Americans, I mean, a handful of Americans do not think should be a top priority. Did she just get up from a coma? 894 executive orders Trump did according to Mo'Brien.

894. Listen, man. I mean, you can't judge Kellyanne on what she says or what she does or anything. Or her, you know, she's Kelly Ann Conway. She's a fucking serial liar. She is a truly awful human being. Yeah, I don't know what else to say about her. There's nothing to say about her except she's a truly awful human being.

Well, I got news for you. We're going to have a world tour of those because we have a new character in the universe. No, please not. He talked to the January 6th committee yesterday. Oh, this guy's amazing. Then he went on telegram to share some thoughts with us all about how it went. See, we're laughing because we heard it. Yes.

They're Bolsheviks, so they probably do hate the American founders. and most white people in general. This is a Bolshevistic anti-white campaign. If you can't see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right? And so today was just a lot of saying that I am invoking my right to silence

under executive privilege in the Fifth Amendment. I'm the least racist person that many of you have ever met. By the way, I have no bigotry. I just try to see the world for where it is. I have no sort of army to hit back at them, right? Because I'm the young guy in the room. And they're not even going after any other young people. The other young people in the White House are total hoes and thoughts like Cassidy Hutchinson

and this Alyssa Farah hobbag who are just terrible. I mean, they have no clue what they're saying. First of all, can we talk about noted Bolshevists, Liz Cheney. It's not her fault. She loves socialism. I always thought of her as more of a Menshevik than a Bolshevik.

She's a Trotskyite or she's nothing. Do you think she's a Trotskyite? Oh, yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was funny that he literally said the, you know, I may be the least racist person that you know thing.

And then I realized he was on telegram, so he might be right. You know what's great about those when people say, I'm the least racist person. You know, you know they're in fact a terrible racist. It's a tell. Yeah. Yeah. It's like saying, I don't see color. You know?

Right. Exactly. Yeah. Right. What I really like about him is he's a new breed on the internet. Like, Eddie, when you texted this last day, I was like, oh, this is like the milkshake duck, except we're experiencing racism first, but we know so much worse is going to come. And then I look at me.

And then I look online in a young savvy reporter at The Daily Beast by the day was Zach Petrazu. I'd already found his 8-Koon profile, which I might add his screen name, Polo Grounds, least shocking thing in the world. Wait, 8-Koon? So that's the evolution of Foreign Chan. Would you want the bad takes? That's where you go. I'm moving to a pineapple under the sea.

You can visit me. We're not. That's okay. So this is an area podcaster streamer named Matt Walsh, who we were talking about last week. He unfortunately got teased a little too much in high school and now has a lot of bad takes to share with us. If you are not in a position where you feel like you're able to, you should conceive a child, if conceiving a child would be disastrous for you, you believe, then do not participate in act. that literally billions of times in the past have resulted in the conception of a child.

If reproduction, I may be able to phrase it this way, because I really want to make it very simple for these people. They have difficulty understanding complex concepts. So we're the ones who have the difficulty. Thank you. If reproduction would be a disaster for you, you believe, then do not participate in the reproductive act. that's all. If you're able to reproduce, and yet reproduction would be a catastrophe, then do not participate in the reproductive act.

He's really smart. That really cleared up a lot for me. I have a bunch of things I could say, but I think I maybe shouldn't. It's the problem with airing these ones with these guys. Yeah. He is in Ben Shapiro's little club of men who hate women. You know, I don't know. I mean, I think all these guys are really,

What's the word? Oh, misogynist. That's good. That was what I'm looking for. But congratulations, because I think of all the misogynists, they're rising to the top. Their misogyny is even more misogynistic. So the interesting thing is, do you think that every time, I hate to put this image in anyone's head, but do you think that every time Matt Gates has had sex, he has been ready to be a father of a child? Whatever happened to Nestor? Remember Nestor? We do have to keep that in mind, Andy, that, you know, he did adopt that poor young man, definitely not to be girls of a certain age. Definitely not. That was an amazing story. I still wonder what happened to Nestor. Justice for Nestor. Paula Elzel and Tanya Lewis Lee are the directors of Aftershock, which is out this week on Hulu. Welcome to the new abnormal, Paula.

Hi, thanks so much for having me. And Tanya. Good morning. Hi. Thank you for having me. You two have directed a very important documentary that I is a super important, a really important subject that is not getting, that is shockingly not getting the kind of attention that it absolutely should be.

Explain to us first, either of you, whoever wants to take the question first, how you got together to direct after shock. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Paula and I actually met at a women. conference. I was there speaking and Paula was there filming. She was in development on this maternal mortality documentary and I had been thinking about working on a maternal mortality documentary and had been looking for a partner and saw her and was like, oh, because someone said she's making a maternal mortality

documentary. I was like, great, let's talk. And we met and we started talking. What we didn't know was that in October 2019, Shammani Gibson had passed away. Paula and I met in November of 2019. And then in December 2019, Shamani's family, Shani Benton Gibson, and Amari Maynard, held what they called Aftershock, which was a celebration of Shemani's life and also a conversation with the community

about what was happening around Black maternal health. And they put out that invitation to the community, on social media, which we saw, we called them and asked if we could film that event, and they welcomed us in because they really wanted to have a broad community conversation. From there, Amber passed away in April 2020. When she passed away, Omari reached out to Bruce McIntyre just to offer support. As they got to know each other, Amari told them about the film. Bruce similarly, I mean, right out. After Amber passed away, he had a press conference wanting to have a conversation with community about what was happening out there.

When he heard about the film, he said, yes, you know, I want to participate as well. And so we all decided to collaborate to make this film. So tell us about the two women you're talking about a little bit about their backstory, if that's possible. The heart and soul of this film are two women, Shemani Gibson and Amber Rose Isaac. These two women were healthy, beautiful women. in their 20s when they became pregnant and died preventable. That's the key, where preventable deaths due to childbirth. Shamani was an artist, a dancer, a hairstylist, her and Omari, who we follow in the film,

had a company called Artful Living, where they were commissioned to make artwork and also did community, worked in community artwork. and through paint parties. And it was a full thriving business. They also have a daughter, Anari, who was just two years old when her mother died. And they were really excited to have another child when they found out Shemani was pregnant. Everyone was overjoyed. They knew they were having a boy, Anari, you know, they already had a girl.

And, you know, these are people who are highly educated, already had a child, were healthy. Shamani really, you know, made the right choices for her birth. She had, she had a doula. She, she had a midwife. I mean, she really knew the landscape here. And Shawnee, her mother is a reproductive health activist. So I say this because she was perfectly healthy and beyond educated more than the typical woman who's pregnant in America. Yet she still died 13 days postpartum because she was not seen and hurt. She ended up having a C-section. was discharged in the hospital. Everything went seemingly well at the C-section. And during those days after, she kept complaining of shortness of breath, of pain, of just being really tired. They spoke to the hospital. They spoke to providers. Everyone told her she's fine. And they said she should rest. And really, that was the worst thing she could have done because she was suffering from a pulmonary embolism. And rest is the worst thing. And then it wasn't until she was literally in shock and called EMS, who as you see in the film,

kept on asking if she was on drugs. It took three rounds of people. And her mother's like, no, she's postpartum. No one listened to her. And so she died, a death that should never have happened. Similarly with Amber Rose Isaac, Amber was 26 years old.

You see her. She was a teacher, a child, you know, an early childhood educator. You see her in the film with her organic planting mix. I mean, healthy as can be. Her and Bruce are, are a loving couple, so excited for the birth of this baby. And when she started complaining that

she wasn't feeling well at points, she was told by her first doctor, she's totally fine. There are other pregnant women who are doing what you're doing. Why can't you do it? Completely dismissed. And as we show in the film, her platelets were dropping. This is recorded in her health records. This is not conjecture. This is evidence in her health records that her platelets were dropping and nobody did anything. They let it happen. It wasn't until they finally, you know, diagnosed her with help syndrome. She went to the hospital a month, you know, before she was due and did they did an emergency C-section where she, you know, they were not equipped and they didn't have a lot of what they needed. And she died immediately from that C-section. And that was

completely preventable. People do not die from help syndrome. That's not something that's a death sentence, that's very manageable. So these women were perfectly healthy women that should not have died. And I think people don't generally die from pregnancy in their 20s, but this is really about racism. Absolutely. At the core of this issue with black women dying, black women with a postgraduate degree, living well socioeconomically, have a higher chance of dying from childbirth complications than white women with a high school diploma living near the poverty line. And, you know, what we're hearing is that it's really when black women show up looking for help like Shemani, like Amber, and they are complaining of pain or something unusual. They are dismissed. People do not hear them. They do not see them. They do not take their concerns seriously.

We've actually had people on this podcast to talk about the racism in Madison and how it's really like racism in other parts of American life really baked in. Were you guys surprised at what you saw? You know, I don't know if surprise is the word, really. I think it's just sometimes validating to see and hear anecdotally what you ultimately know. I think that, you know, one of the people that we follow in the film, Felicia Ellis, talks about how, you know, being a black woman in giving birth is like being a black man at a traffic stop, right? Whenever we find ourselves in these systems, whether it be justice, police, or health care, often black people are viewed suspiciously or as if they don't know anything. They don't know. They're ignorant.

They're suspicious. And, I mean, Bruce talks about how he was referred to as a baby daddy. I mean, it's not in the film, but he talks about how when they presented to the doctor and she knew they weren't married, she started talking to them differently. You know, it's just the way. And I know we talk a lot about implicit bias, but a lot of the bias that black and brown people experience in the health care system is very explicit. It's such a problem. The numbers are crazy. Like I've seen the numbers.

I can't even wrap my head around how much more dangerous it is to be a black woman delivering a child than it is to be a white woman delivering a child. The people listening to this podcast being horrified. I mean, what can they do? The good thing is that there are solutions. This is a solvable crisis. And Tony and I, you know, did not sit out to make a doom and gloom film. So there's lots to be done. And the first thing that's glaringly obvious is that we do not have an integrated maternal health system.

That means we do not have midwives in our system. Every other industrialized country has midwives except for the U.S. And their rates are much better. And that affects all American women, by the way. This system isn't working for anyone. It affects black women in horrifically profound ways. It needs a complete restructure in general nationally. Integrated midwives is the midwifery model of care is human-centered.

So you are seeing and hearing that person. There's much more time and must less intervention. And we see that as the more you intervene as C-section rise, And as we know, black women are getting more C-sections or are forced to get more C-sections than white women. The mortality rate rises along with it. So midwives are proven to cut down those C-section rates. Postpartum, that's another huge difference in our system. We do not have postpartum care.

A woman has a baby. You're sent home. And you can see your doctor six weeks later if you can even make that appointment. In other countries, women are seen a few days after birth, a week after birth. a week after birth, the care continues. Here, Medicaid in some states drops you after six weeks. We don't even have insurance coverage to even cover up to one year postpartum. And a third of the deaths are happening postpartum like Shemani Gibson.

They're not just happening while giving birth. So we have to remember that and really improve postpartum care. And with postpartum care comes paid family leave. We need to give women the time to heal and to focus. on themselves and on their babies right after they give birth. So there's a lot that we can do. And even while all that restructuring is happening, just telling women and talking to other women about the choices people have around birthing is very empowering that women, you know, can demand evidence-based care. You can find a midwife. You can hire a doula. There are,

you know, initiatives in states to cover doula care with insurance. Like there are things that you can do right now to make sure that the birthing experience you're having is not just safe, but it's dignified, and it's a good experience because survival is the lowest possible bar. We should not be striving to survive. Birth, we should be striving to thrive in birth and to have great birth. Lastly, another thing is really increasing the perinatal workforce, especially for black midwives. We need more midwifery schools. Oh, interesting. Run by black midwives. We need more blackwood midwives in the system. So these are a bunch of immediate things that we can do to solve this crisis.

I'm also curious, like, I have friends who have had this experience. Is there any world in which there's training for doctors on anti-racism? I mean, because clearly that's a real problem. Yeah, I think you raise a really good point. And that's one of the things. I mean, we hope the film is used as a tool in that way as well. But I think that med schools need to start talking about the truth in the way that they educate doctors. You know, we were years ago having a conversation with a doctor about how do you

teach empathy, right? You know, unfortunately, people are coming to the profession with their own sort of pre-existing conditioning. And I think that med schools have a responsibility to start teaching and having anti-racism training, although, you know, we're in a climate right now where it's very hard to even have those conversations and it's killing black people. So doctors do need that kind of education, but at the same time, we need to be working to try to bring in more black doctors, as Paula said, and more black midwives to the profession so that we do have. There's been a study that shows that certainly that infants do better when they're treated by black doctors. And that's not to say white doctors can't work with black people,

but we need more culturally congruent health care in general. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. This is so important. this topic. This movie is so amazing. I'm so just grateful to have you both. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media.

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