Tori Bowie shouldn’t have died in childbirth. We need more awareness about preeclampsia
There is an African saying: When giving birth, women have one foot in the grave and one foot out.
When I gave birth to my daughter, Ayah, in 2010, I had no idea what that old wives’ tale meant, but I quickly learned. While bringing a life into this world, I had to fight to keep my own.
During labor, I developed an acute case of eclampsia, or seizures caused by dangerously high blood pressure in pregnancy, which also caused my kidneys to fail. I needed and received a kidney transplant, after years of dialysis.
The ordeal redirected the trajectory of my life. Overnight, I became an advocate for myself, Black women and mothers across the country.
These past 13 years, I’ve seen and heard countless stories of women, particularly Black women, having near-death and fatal experiences with preeclampsia and eclampsia at alarming rates. Reading about Olympic star Tori Bowie’s tragic story brought up so many powerful emotions because, in many ways, the description of her final moments mirrored my own birth experience, but with a different outcome.
Like Bowie, I was also eight months pregnant and alone on the night symptoms surfaced. Ayah’s father lived in Miami, and I lived in Tampa. The moment I felt discomfort with no signs of relief, I called my midwife for instructions. She told me it was probably nothing, but I went to the hospital anyway.
The biggest lesson I learned in that moment was to listen to my body. The doctors told me that my blood pressure was extremely high. Ayah would have to be delivered right away.
That’s the last thing I remember before having two seizures, lapsing into a coma and staying in the hospital’s intensive care unit for more than three months.
There was virtually no education or awareness about preeclampsia available to me in 2010. No one ever mentioned the dangers of elevated blood pressure during pregnancy. I was only told that a Caesarean section would be my best, and frankly, only option if I became high risk.
I would love to say that communication between patients and medical professionals has improved since my experience, but statistics and testimonials prove otherwise. We, as a nation, still have a long way to go in achieving racial equity and access to quality healthcare for all our citizens.
When it comes to hypertensive disorders associated with pregnancy, more education and awareness are needed.
Studies show Black women are 60% more likely to develop preeclampsia and other complications during childbirth than women of demographics in the U.S. Preeclampsia survivors also are four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease later in life. However, the national level of preeclampsia awareness is at 42%, according to a recent study by the March of Dimes. Awareness in Black communities across the country is much lower.
After the coroner’s report on Bowie was made public this month, dozens of comments flooded a popular blog’s post from people who had experienced or witnessed a traumatic pregnancy and/or childbirth that went unchecked.
Throughout the years, I have worked alongside the Preeclampsia Foundation to raise awareness, advocate policy changes and educate medical professionals. I have proudly been the voice for mothers who survived preeclampsia and for those we’ve lost to this preventable condition.
Research has advanced to the point where we now know the signs and symptoms of preeclampsia and can pass this knowledge on to pregnant women and their families. Technology has advanced so much, there are even biomarkers that can potentially help medical professionals detect preeclampsia before it claims a life.
Working on the foundation’s new Take 10 for Preeclampsia Research campaign has afforded me the opportunity to work alongside other Black moms to take back our collective narrative and spread awareness about the disorder. The campaign provides voices and faces to Black women’s childbirth experiences while gathering information directly from them for research purposes specifically tailored for our community.
I will not stop educating women about the dangers of this condition and the traumatic impact that it has had on my life. Bowie’s outcome should have been very different. But my outcome should’ve been as well.
Today, with both of my feet planted firmly on the ground, I continue to work to debunk that old wives’ tale.