Irin Carmon

And so even if you do go through this process where you have to tell your story over and over again, re-traumatize yourself, spend hours where you could be taking care of your kids or yourself...

It may not lead to very much.

And what happens?

What happened at Woodhull is that a few months after Christine died, they finally fired that doctor.

But did they fix the underlying problems that would lead Christine to be left alone to bleed to death when there were obvious signs of distress, when her IV was not hooked up, when nobody checked on her even though she had had major surgery?

So I think one of the aspects of the problem that I explore in the book is that although it deeply shocked me that Maggie and Christine had the same doctor making the same mistake four years apart—

It's so much bigger than just one quote-unquote bad doctor.

It's also a level of disinvestment that we've tolerated that surfaces at moments like this, that some hospitals can't pay their doctors as much, are afraid to fire the bad doctors because they might not be able to hire another one.

They rely on Medicaid.

We are experiencing a crisis in cuts to Medicaid that we haven't even yet felt the full impact of in this country.

So there's research that shows that you are likelier to be mistreated depending on the race of your partner.

So women of any race were in these surveys, these very large surveys that were conducted about mistreatment and birth.

Women of any race were likelier to be mistreated if they had a black partner.

Right.

There's also research that shows that the act of pushing back on your medical care during pregnancy is a kind of catch-22 because some people are penalized for complaining.

They're retaliated against once they are perceived as difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Jose said that he felt that he had been marked from the beginning when they came to the hospital as a problem because he was advocating for Christine.

And he's Latino, and he has a lot of tattoos.