Christian Menefee: “Mr. Speaker, I speak today because Congress must do all it can to end the disparities in Black maternal health outcomes…”

“Mr. Speaker, I speak today because Congress must do all it can to end the disparities in Black maternal health outcomes in this country. Moriah Ballard was 22 years old, a Houston woman, who was 7 months pregnant. She was ready. She and her husband had just bought a four-bedroom house. The nursery was set. The baby shower was planned. They had clothes, the onesies, and the books, until she went to the hospital with a headache one day and had some dizziness. Doctors found her blood pressure was dangerously high. She had preeclampsia. They transferred her to a larger hospital, one of the most celebrated medical institutions in the entire country. Over the next 3 days, her pain became unbearable. Her vision started to fail. Her blood pressure climbed to an untenable level. She kept pressing the call light in her room and kept pressing it, but nobody came. She lost her son in that experience--delivered stillborn. She woke up from surgery blind in one eye. Doctors later told her they wished that they had acted sooner. That Houston woman's story is not a tragedy. It is a pattern. Across this country, Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at three times the rate of White women. The CDC tells us that more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable--not inevitable, but preventable. In Texas it is even worse. In my district, it is the worst in the Nation.”