Midwife Victoria Buchanan hears a common refrain from pregnant Black women in her care:
“Oh, I just don’t want to die,” Buchanan said they tell her. “I just want to come out of here alive. I want to have a healthy baby. I want to be next to my kids.”
Buchanan, 28, believes that she and the team at Sentara Midwifery Specialists in Hampton, Va., can keep new mothers and their babies healthy and defy the bleak statistics linked to Black pregnancies. Research shows that Black women in the United States are three times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death than white women. In Virginia, Black women in recent years have been more than twice as likely as other mothers to have a death attributed to childbirth.
