Studies that examine obstetric violence and mistreatment during perinatal care demonstrate that Black women experience higher levels of harm and abuse than other racialized groups. Yet these gender-based concepts do not fully recognize the intersectional gender-and race-based harms that Black women experience within the context of quality, safety, and human rights violations in the U.S. healthcare system.
We performed qualitative secondary analysis from Black women participants in the Giving Voice to Mothers (GVtM) study (n = 304). Primary data collection for the GVtM survey spanned from 2016 to 2017, and our analysis occurred in 2023, focusing on the interpretation of open-ended responses to three categories of inquiry: worst experiences with perinatal care, experiences of being pressured to undergo medical interventions, and desired revisions to birthing experiences. We employed a deductive approach and applied two analytic frameworks – obstetric racism and the Black Birthing Bill of Rights (BBBR)– to categorize Black women's narratives of harm during perinatal care as quality, safety, and human rights violations.
Black women described perinatal care experiences with considerable violations of the BBBR, including disrupted time with babies, racially discordant care, and unaffordable care. These experiences illustrated all six domains of obstetric racism.
This study contributes to an emerging body of Black feminist approaches to knowledge production in obstetric patient safety, emphasizing the critical intersection of gender and race. Furthermore, this study underscores the value of using Black-women-defined frameworks with typologies to interpret the distinct experiences of Black women instead of the more limited gender-based concepts of obstetric violence, mistreatment, and respectful maternity care that lack historical context and contemporary implications of anti-Black racism and misogynoir.
Since the US Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 18 states have enacted functional bans on abortion, yet little is known about how these laws contribute to workplace stress and its sequelae among clinicians. The purpose of this study was to characterize sources of moral distress—which occurs when a clinician knows the right course of clinical action but is barred from taking that action by external constraints—among obstetrician-gynecologists (OB-GYNs) in states with abortion bans. We conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 54 OB-GYNs practicing in 13 of 14 states where abortion was illegal as of March 2023. Using a qualitative descriptive coding approach, we identified four types of clinical situations leading to moral distress: delaying treatment for patients with obstetric complications, conflict with other clinicians, denying care they would have provided locally prior to Dobbs, and restrictions on clinical counseling. These situations provoked feelings of anger, frustration, helplessness, and emotional exhaustion. Participants attributed moral distress to the cumulative toll of routinely being unable to provide evidence-based healthcare, in addition to the acute burden of managing obstetric emergencies in legal gray areas, which was relatively rarer. The findings demonstrate a previously unreported source of moral distress: the everyday chipping away of professional integrity that occurs when OB-GYNs cannot care for patients in the way that patients need. Next steps include developing institutional-level policies and programs to support clinicians and enable them to practice ethical medicine in abortion-restrictive policy environments.
The increased prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in recent years has led many Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), including Tanzania, to develop policies to manage their burden. Musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, such as arthritis, account for 20% of all years lived with disability in LMICs, but the NCD strategies rarely address them. There is substantial research on the disruption MSK conditions cause to people's lives within High-Income Countries, but very little is known about the lived experiences in LMICs. We investigated the experience of MSK conditions in 48 in-depth qualitative interviews with participants from the Hai District in Tanzania, East Africa, all of whom had a MSK disorder (confirmed through clinical examination as part of a broader study). We found that loss of mobility and pain associated with MSK disorders severely limits people's everyday lives and livelihoods. Help from others, mainly those within a household, is necessary for most tasks and those with limited or no support experience particular problems. We found barriers to accessing care and treatment in the form of high direct and indirect (through travel) care costs within formal health services in Tanzania. We argue for increased attention to the growing problem of MSK disorders in LMICs and that this agenda should be driven by a patient-centred approach which designs services accessible to the target population and designed to recognise their embodied expertise.