Heads up, here comes another storm…

Weaponised tragedy alert.

Today on This Morning, a mid-morning TV show here in the UK, was a piece about how black women in the UK are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. This has recently come down from a 5 to 1 ratio. Mixed race women are three times more likely and Asian women (which in Britain is mostly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women) are twice as likely.

Any death in childbirth is a tragedy. It is one of the proud boasts of the western world that it has brought down both the deaths of new-born babies and mothers from the horrific heights they were at historically. Any significant differences in the rates of maternal deaths between groups should claim our attention and are worth looking at closely and carefully. It may be that there are measures that can be taken to bring rates down even further.

However, I am not confident that this statistic will receive calm examination it needs. The piece on the programme was trailing a documentary that airs on Monday on Channel 4, which is leftist, even by TV standards. The documentary is by the Dispatches team, leftists even by Channel 4 standards. The clip they showed had a black doctor making a claim about how black women are treated/not listened to. This claim might well be true, but the doctor would need to be an amazing psychic to know it. Another black OBGYN specialist who was interviewed on This Morning had an Obama biography prominently displayed on her bookshelf behind her, taken out and turned to show the cover. When the This Morning presenter interviewed the presenter of the documentary, she addressed her as “my sister” and ended the interview by thanking her for her work in “saving our beautiful black queens.”. The piece went on for some five minutes and at no point were any potential environmental or lifetsyle factors discussed. A lot was said about the need for black women to be listened to.

I’m not a doctor, or a social scientist, but off the top of my head I would say that the fact that the UK’s non- white population (about 15%) tends to be concentrated in the less well-off areas of the bigger cities could be a factor. I would not be surprised if the rates of death in childbirth for urban white working-class women was higher than for better off white women living in healthier places. Lifestyle choices also make a difference in matters of health, for example, the higher obesity levels among the non-white population have contributed to higher CCP Virus death rates in the UK. Again, these factors apply as much to the urban white working class as well, but they simply don’t matter in 21^st century Britain. This illustrates one of the risks that come with identity politics. This case has already been framed purely in terms of race. I would not be at all surprised if we were to divide up the whole group of mothers dying in childbirth by economic status as well as race we would find poor white mothers are at higher risk than rich black ones.

Something else that wasn’t looked at was what the actual numbers are. I mentioned that deaths in childbirth have been brought way down in the last century. When numbers are low statistics can swing wildly. We were also left ignorant of the definition of a death in childbirth, which is. “death of a woman during or up to six weeks (42 days) after the end of pregnancy (whether the pregnancy ended by termination, miscarriage or a birth, or was an ectopic pregnancy) through causes associated with, or exacerbated by, pregnancy” (World Health Organisation 2010). So, a much wider definition than the what you might expect from the phrase “death in childbirth” and one that brings in many more behavioural and environmental factors than the immediate care (or lack of it) provided in hospital.

Nail up the shutters, bring in the dog, there’s a storm comin’

If what I saw today is anything to go by a calm study of the underlying causes of this will be ignored in favour of using the discrepancy in the next big kulturkampf campaign. Usually, the Woke weather blows west to east, with storms of outrage coming to the UK from the USA. This time it may be different, unless it’s already there, be aware that Storm Maternity Deaths is potentially coming across the Atlantic to drench America in guilt and outrage anytime soon. I would be very surprised if the stats for maternal deaths in the US are much different from ours, broadly the same urban/low-income/lifestyle stats apply to the black population.

I hope I’m wrong, but don’t be surprised to see the “inherent systemic racism” of the US blamed for deaths in childbirth and raising a storm in the next few weeks and months.

It should go without saying, I have spent over an hour researching and writing this not because I don’t care about saving “our beautuful black queens”, but because I do. It seems an opportunity to bring maternal deaths down still further will be lost in yet another case of weaponised tragedy being used to further The Narrative. Of course, it does go without saying that 40+% of black babies never making it out of the womb will continue to be ingored.