When I was 29 weeks pregnant, my water broke. The baby was the size of a coconut, where they should have been the size of a watermelon. Outside the weather was still warm and sunny, where it should have been cool and gray—drugstore shelves were lined with Halloween candy, where they should have been filled with Valentine’s Day chocolate. And instead of sitting at home practicing my kegels, I was at work. In other words, it was too soon.
At the hospital, they pumped medication into my veins that made me feel hot and metallic and nauseated, and delivered the prognosis: not great. A word salad of neonatal morbidities associated with preterm birth followed. Cerebral palsy, necrotizing enterocolitis, retinopathy of prematurity, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, impaired lung function, behavioral problems, mental health conditions, neurological disorders, hearing loss, reduced cognition. After letting me know all the ways in which my baby might be damaged, a doctor attempted to reassure me. “Your child,” he told me, “is extremely likely to survive.” It was the first time it occurred to me that he might not.
It wasn’t reassuring. My baby wouldn’t die, probably, but they would be born with significant complications, require a breathing tube, a feeding tube, grow inside an incubator instead of inside my body. It was terrifying, alarming. But here’s what’s more alarming: I knew this would happen. It shouldn’t have happened. It didn’t have to happen. But I knew it would happen. It was completely foreseeable and preventable, but also, inevitable.
The United States is the most dangerous place in the developed world for a Black woman to deliver a baby. Black women are three times as likely as white women to die during childbirth. Babies born to Black women are twice as likely as babies born to white women to die before their first birthdays, mostly due to low birth weight. The mortality rate for babies born to college educated Black women is higher still than that of babies born to white women with less than a high school education, a statistic that is damning in so many ways.
I was aware of these stats when I became pregnant. I am a Black woman with a college degree, a data scientist to boot. But despite what the data told me, I still hoped that my wealth and education could protect me. What else is it for? Knowledge is power. Money is supposed to be inoculating. I was not naive enough to believe that was fully true—even Oprah gets profiled trying to buy an expensive handbag—but the glory and grift of America is that if you work hard and make a lot of money, it can ease the burden of living. It can mitigate at least some forms of discrimination. If nothing else, it can give you the ability to afford things: a nice house, good schools, fancy doctors, a $1,700 bassinet that rocks your baby to sleep using smart technology. So even though I knew that when some people look at me, they don’t see my humanity, much less my degrees or my money—all they see is a Black person, someone less than—I still occasionally found myself guilty of buying into the line of thinking that money could protect me.