Editor’s note: This story contains language that may be offensive.
In February 2009, Samantha Pierce became pregnant with twins. It was a time when things were going really well in her life.
She and her husband had recently gotten married. They had good jobs.
“I was a kick-ass community organizer,” says Pierce, who is African-American and lives in Cleveland. She worked for a nonprofit that fought against predatory lending. The organization was growing, and Pierce had been promoted to management.
It felt like a good time to get pregnant. “I went to get my birth control taken out and showed up two weeks later, like ‘Hey, We’re pregnant!’ ” she says, laughing.
Pierce thought she was a poster child for a good pregnancy. She already had one son from a previous marriage, and that pregnancy was healthy and normal. She had a college degree, which is known to improve women’s chances of having a healthy pregnancy. She was getting regular checkups and taking her prenatal vitamins.
Everything went smoothly until one day in her second trimester she discovered she was leaking fluid. After a week in the hospital, still leaking, her water broke and she gave birth to her sons. “They lived for about five minutes, each of them,” she says. “But they couldn’t breathe. They didn’t have lungs. We got to hold them, talk to them. I could see them breathing. I could also see them stop breathing, you know.”
Pierce was devastated. For months, she couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror, especially her stomach. She felt as if her womb was a cemetery — “a walking tomb,” she says. “It was just walking evidence of loss, of failure, of not being able to hold kids in. I couldn’t even do the one thing I was put on this planet for, which was bear children.”
A chilling statistic
What Samantha Pierce didn’t know then was that her twins had become part of a chilling statistic. “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for every 1,000 live births, 4.8 white infants die in the first year of life. For black babies, that number is 11.7.
Source: Rhitu Chatterjee | Rebecca Davis
