Dismantle structural barriers to improve reproductive healthcare for racially minoritised women

Abstract

Reproductive justice requires an intersectional approach, says Danielle Solomon Over the past decade inequities in reproductive outcomes among racially minoritised women have increasingly become a part of public health discourse. This is largely because of widespread advocacy efforts led by organisations such as Five x More1 and the Reproductive Justice Initiative.2 It is an area that was the subject of a feature in the 2020 BMJ Racism in Medicine series,3 and it is just as relevant in this series, five years later. If we are to tackle these inequities, it is crucial that decision makers understand the complex, structural drivers of reproductive health inequality. One of the key statistics—often at the forefront of this discourse—is the disparity in maternal mortality between black and white women. In the UK, women of black ethnicity are twice as likely to die during pregnancy and the neonatal period as white women, and the maternal mortality risk among Asian women is also higher than in white women.4 This is just the tip of the iceberg—racial inequity stretches across the entirety of reproductive health. Risk of miscarriage is …