Laboring Black Woman Forced to Give Birth in Parking Lot After Racist Suspects @ Indy Hospital Turned Her Away [Racists Know the Difference btw Right and Wrong but Ignore it when race is a variable]

Two pregnant Black women nearly 1,000 miles apart were ready to do what many do every day: welcome new bundles of joy, and just before the start of the holiday season. Instead, the health of both women and their babies was put at risk after hospital staff did not immediately provide the needed care.

One woman was discharged and delivered her baby on the side of an Indiana highway, while the other nearly gave birth in a Texas hospital’s emergency waiting room. Both women survived, but are still reeling from ordeals that have drawn national attention — in part, because they were captured on video and shared on social media.

Each instance highlights the long-standing and rising disparities in health outcomes for Black women, who die at a rate nearly 3.5 times higher than white women around the time of childbirth, according to a 2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

While maternal mortality rates for white, Hispanic and Asian women fell in 2023, according to the CDC report, the rate for Black women barely budged.

Now, the women’s families, health organizations and civil rights advocates are urging the medical profession to address systemic racism that they say perpetuates Black women’s experiences.

‘I felt dismissed’

Mercedes Wells’ water had already broken when a nurse at Indiana’s Franciscan Health Crown Point hospital checked on her in triage, a room typically designated for women in earlier trimesters of pregnancy.

Wells, already a mother of three, knew the baby could come at any minute. The nurse did not believe she was going into labor, Wells recalled.

“She still suggested that I be discharged and I begged, ‘No, I can’t be discharged. Please don’t discharge me because I am about to have this baby,’” Wells, 38, told The Associated Press from her Chicago area home in Dolton, Illinois.

“I began to wail because I was in so much pain, and my feelings were hurt because that was happening to me. So I let out a cry, you know? The nurses showed no compassion, none of them,” said Wells, whose experience was captured in a now-viral video of her crying in pain as nurses pushed her toward the exit.

But she was out of time. Wells felt the baby coming.

Her husband, Leon, loaded her into their car and sped away hoping to reach another hospital. Thereafter, in the early morning hours of Nov. 16, he pulled over on a Lake County highway and delivered their daughter.

Wells said the nurses she saw were all white, and all assured her that concerns were relayed to the attending physician.

“I felt dismissed. I felt ignored, disregarded as a whole,” she said. “I’m dealing with this pain, and they’re all watching me from the nurse’s station as if it’s normal to send someone out in that much pain.”

Franciscan Health Crown Point said in a statement that both the nurse and physician involved in Wells’ ordeal were fired and that the hospital has mandated cultural competency training for all labor and delivery staff. [MORE]