As Black Maternal Health Week marks its 10th year, advocates are celebrating progress while sounding the alarm over federal rollbacks that threaten to undo it.
When Traci Dancy became pregnant with her first daughter, she had no chronic conditions, no high-risk flags, nothing on paper that should have made her afraid. But she was afraid. “As a person of color, I am very aware of the dangers and risks,” she told The Beacon. She was right to be.
In 2023, the most recent year for which federal data are available, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Black women in the United States died from pregnancy-related causes at a rate of 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than three times the rate for white women (14.5) and more than four times the rate for Asian women (10.7). Of the 669 women who died of maternal causes that year, 247 were Black. Every other group’s rate declined. Black women’s rate did not.
This April 11-17, the Black maternal health movement marks a decade of organized resistance to those numbers. Black Maternal Health Week 2026 was founded and is led by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance (BMMA), and carries the theme “Rooted in Justice and Joy.” The current policy landscape makes the case for why the work has never been more urgent.
Black maternal health progress, and the gap that remains
There has been real progress since 2018. Extended postpartum Medicaid coverage, now available in most states, helped reduce overall maternal mortality from a 2021 pandemic-era high to 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023. For the fourth consecutive year, the United States earned D+ from the March of Dimes for maternal and infant health, as accessHealth News reported. Behind that grade, the racial gap is not closing. Still, a 2025 study published in PMC found that the pandemic significantly widened the racial mortality gap and that post-pandemic trends remain deeply concerning for Black mothers. The data confirm what advocates have long argued: systemic disparities do not resolve themselves when a crisis subsides.
The leading causes of maternal death are excessive bleeding, blood vessel blockages, and infections. They affect all women, but they kill Black women at far higher rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation points to structural racism, the social determinants of health, implicit bias, and unequal access to quality care as key drivers. It is the product of systems that were not built with Black women’s survival in mind.
Black maternal health in Missouri and Kansas
In Missouri, Black women die from pregnancy-related complications at two and a half times the rate of white women, according to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ Pregnancy Associated Mortality Review. Nurture KC put the state’s mortality rate for Black moms at 65 deaths per 100,000 births, nearly 30% higher than the already alarming national rate. Missouri ranks 44th in the nation in overall maternal mortality rates.
A significant part of the problem is geographic. The March of Dimes reports that nearly half of Kansas’s 105 counties, 47.6%, qualify as maternity care deserts, defined as counties with no hospital offering obstetric services and no obstetric clinician. National research published in the Journal of The American Board of Family Medicine found that 36% of all U.S. counties meet that same definition. Communities of color bear a disproportionate share of that burden.
“Women of color, and women who are poor, especially Medicaid recipients, they’re not treated with the same level of respect,” State Sen. Barbara Washington, D-Kansas City, told the Missouri Independent in January. “I’m not sure if any woman is, to be honest.”
Both states have taken steps to respond. Missouri and Kansas have extended postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to a full year, giving women a longer window to catch complications before they become fatal. Missouri Medicaid now covers group prenatal care, a model that has shown particular promise for Black patients. Dancy, who lives in Lee’s Summit, enrolled in one such program and credits it with helping her feel prepared and supported through her pregnancy. Kansas City also committed $250,000 to provide free doulas to pregnant people in the city’s highest-need ZIP codes, The Beacon reported. These are meaningful steps, but state-level investments depend heavily on federal support, and that support is eroding.
“There’s implicit bias when you’re a Black patient and you have a non-Black provider,” LaTasha Seliby Perkins, an assistant professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, told Axios. Perkins, who is African American, noted that even her own pregnancy as a physician was subject to her doctor overlooking the fact that she was of advanced maternal age.
Federal cuts threaten Black maternal health gains
The Trump administration’s restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services knocked out much of the infrastructure that supports maternal health research and policy nationwide. According to KFF, most staff in the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health were laid off and community-based maternal health grants were halted, the prior White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis was erased, and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) was eliminated. PRAMS had for decades provided states with the data they use to understand why women die and what can be done to prevent it.
The president’s fiscal year 2026 federal budget also called for eliminating funding for the CDC’s Safe Motherhood program, according to Health Policy Today. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later signaled a willingness to restore it, acknowledging its disproportionate impact on Black communities. Meanwhile, bipartisan efforts are underway in Congress, though the outcome remains uncertain.
Coverage losses are compounding the problem further. The 2025 tax and budget law allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits to expire. As a result, The Century Foundation estimates that 4.8 million ACA marketplace enrollees will lose their health coverage. Black women, who rely disproportionately on both Medicaid and marketplace coverage, are among those most at risk. Proposed Medicaid cysts also threaten to accelerate obstetric unit closures.
The human cost of those cuts is already taking shape. A $2.4 million study on Black maternal health at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was canceled mid-project after NIH grants tied to health equity work were eliminated, the Association of Health Care Journalists reported. The study was led by Dr. Janice Slaughter-Acey, whose research focused specifically on preventing deaths among Black mothers and infants. The findings that could have saved lives will not be produced. “Maternal health is facing threats on multiple fronts,” said the authors of the State of Maternal Health 2025 report published by The Century Foundation, citing federal funding cuts, inadequate health care, declining access to care, insufficient data, and direct attacks on reproductive health. For Black women, those threats land on ground that was already unstable.
Community care is central to Black maternal health
What the movement keeps returning to, especially in moments of policy failure, is a practice that predates modern medicine entirely. Long before medicalization of birth, Black midwives were the primary source of birth care in this country. According to the National Partnership for Women & Families, granny midwives cared for enslaved women during labor and delivery, coached mothers through breathing and positioning, maintained ancestry records when families were separated by sale, and supported their communities with knowledge rooted in African traditions of healing. After emancipation, they continued to serve Black and white communities across the South, often the only care available for families barred from segregated hospitals.
That living tradition is what organizations like Jamaa Birth Village and the Missouri Community Doula Council are working to sustain in Missouri today, organizing community-rooted care and advocating for Black birth workers. Research consistently shows that doulas increase the likelihood of spontaneous vaginal birth, reduce cesarean rates, and improve patient satisfaction. Community-based doulas, those who share race, ethnicity, or culture with the people they serve, have shown particular promise in reducing the kind of provider bias that Perkins described. Sharia Monroe, founder of the International Center for Traditional Childbearing and a leading figure in the U.S. Black midwives movement has spent decades making that case and has the policy to back it up. Monroe led Oregon to become the first state to offer Medicaid reimbursement for doulas, a model that Missouri lawmakers, Including Rep. LaKeySha Bosley and Sen. Barbara Washington, are actively working to replicate through pending legislation.
“Black communities have done what we have always done; we have turned to one another,” said Jamarah Amani, a midwife and executive director of the Southern Birth Justice Network. “We’ve turned to community practices. That’s why you see this emphasis on doulas and midwives, because we know the historical practices and how we have taken care of each other when this country has failed us.”
That work is playing out in Missouri too. Carmen Southall-Wamhoff, a Kansas City-area doula, midwife in training, and member of the Missouri MOMNIBUS Steering Committee, has spent years navigating hospital systems on behalf of her clients, pushing back against the inertia and bias that put Black mothers at risk. “It shouldn’t be as hard as it is,” she told Generate Health STL. “It can feel like two steps forward and one step back.” She keeps going anyway. Organizations like Altruism, Inc. are doing the same. Through its Maternal and Infant Health (MaIH) Center, with locations in Lexington and Kansas City, Altruism pairs pregnant people with doulas at no cost to those on Medicaid or without insurance, wrapping birth support around mental health care, nutrition, and practical needs like diapers and clothing.
Events planned for Black Maternal Health Week 2026 reflect that same determination. In Richmond, Virginia, the advocacy group Birth in Color is hosting a State of the Union on Black Maternal Health, grading state and federal administrations on their records and pushing for policy change. The Shades of Motherhood Network is also leading locally rooted programming including art, storytelling, policy dialogues, and wellness gatherings, designed to offer something other than a catalog of grief.
The theme “Rooted in Justice and Joy” is not a pivot away from the urgency. It is an argument that joy is part of the work. The United States spends more on health care than any other wealthy nation and still loses Black mothers at rates that have barely budged in years. The work of Black Maternal Health Week is an attempt to change that, one policy, one birth worker, one supported mother at a time. The question in 2026 is whether that work can hold its ground.
Black Maternal Health Week 2026 runs April 11-17. For more information and resources, visit the Black Mamas Matter Alliance.
