Angela Phillips had been in labor for almost three days when her doctors began to pressure her to have a cesarean section.

There wasn’t a medical reason other than the fact that her labor had been long and didn’t seem to be progressing. She declined the procedure. But then Phillips felt the doctors’ and nurses’ attitudes toward her change.

“I felt like I was under a microscope and couldn’t really relax,” Phillips said. She felt as though her experience “didn’t matter” to the doctors, who seemed to be set on performing a C-section “so they could be done with it.”

Phillips, who lives in Richmond, California, eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl without a C-section. But her hospital experience was painful and traumatic, and, as a Black woman, she wonders if part of that was due to unconscious biases among the health care workers or to institutional racism embedded in the medical system. Doctors often fail to listen to Black mothers, resulting in higher complications for their births, research has shown. Disregarding input from pregnant women increases the risk of death and complications for the mothers and their babies. C-section rates are also higher among Black women.

For her next three children, Phillips gave birth at home with midwife Laura Perez, who listened to her needs while also providing medical care. The use of alternative birthing methods, like home births and birthing centers, has risen over the past decade, especially among Black women, according to Bay Area doulas. Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to die from childbirth than White women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, partially because doctors often shrug off Black women’s concerns.

Read the full article about racial birth disparities by Myah Overstreet at YES! Magazine.