LEMON DROP - Midterms 2026: Black Women Are Dying And It's On The Ballot
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Why is Harris County so dangerous for Black maternal health?
If you're a black woman having a baby in Harris County, Texas, the numbers are frightening. A recent investigation described Harris County as the deadliest place in America for black mothers to give birth. From 2016 to 2020, black women there died from maternal causes at a rate of more than 83 deaths for every 100,000 live births, dramatically higher than the national rate for Black women during that period. And this is in Houston. It's home of one of the most sophisticated medical communities in the world. So why is this happening? My next guest wants to help change it, and that's Dr. Plummer, is a practicing health professional and the Democratic nominee for Harris County Judge. So thank you for joining us, joining us.
And her candidacy is part of a much bigger story about Black women seeking political power all across the country. So joining Dr. Plummer is attorney and political commentator Monique Presley, who is here to put this moment and the growing number of black women seeking office into historical context and also. To to really tell us what's at stake coming in just a few days. Not a few weeks, just a few days. So welcome to both of you. Thank you for joining. Dr. Plummer, you're a health professional. When you hear that Harris County has been described as the deadliest place in America for black women to give birth. What do you say? It what does that say about the system? Um, right now and what voters need.
No, absolutely.
How do healthcare access, food insecurity, and stress drive Black maternal mortality?
So first of all, thank you for having me and thank you for this conversation. Uh I got my start in Harris Health as a very young dentist and I served um in the dental centers, uh in two of the centers in the Harris County. Harris County is really the catch all for many of the uninsured. And what we find, honestly, Dawn. Is the reason why we're seeing the infant mortality and the maternal mortality in Harris County is because we don't have the infrastructure that's necessary to make sure that people have access to health care. We are very fortunate to have Harris Health as that safety net, but we need more community centers. We need to educate our black moms more often and we need to give them a level of nourishment.
We have uh food deserts in our communities, so there's no opportunity for that. High levels of stress, we know um those microaggressions um cause us to have more stressful births and then we don't have the opportunity to get a preterm, um early childhood. Um uh care. And so so those all lead to the issue that when they go to the hospital, oftentimes they're uninsured. And so they're they're deal we're dealing with morbidity, which means that they're actually physically um, you know, having deaths because of of causes that could be prevented. And then mortality, which means that they're they're just their children are dying um at childbirth.
One more thing. I I hear you. I hear you. But I want to drill down on this because Houston has a has the Texas Medical Center, some of the most sophisticated hospitals in the country. How can you have world class medicine sitting alongside these kinds of outcomes for black mothers? It just seems it it just doesn't compute.
No, it doesn't match up. Um, no, no, I completely agree with you. Um, so this is the the crazy thing. People come from all over the world to visit our healthcare system within here within Houston, Harris County, but the folks that live here don't have access to it because our governor did not expand Medicaid, which means that if you don't have private insurance or if you're not able to go to Harris Health, which is our public healthcare system, then you do not have access. And so that's, you know, Texas didn't expand Medicaid. Many states did, but we chose, our governor chose not to. And so uh there's there's that we have the highest level of uninsured in the nation in Texas. And so the kit the catch-all for that is our public health services.
You know, also keep in mind that many of our um many of our citywide healthcare centers are funded by grants. And this new Trump administration, all of those, all of those grants are being eliminated.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is Harris County so dangerous for Black maternal health?
0:00–1:17
2
How do healthcare access, food insecurity, and stress drive Black maternal mortality?
1:17–3:58
3
How does racial bias in hospitals put Black mothers at risk?
3:58–5:23
4
Why are Black women seeking more political power in 2026?
5:23–7:54
5
How can voting change healthcare policy and maternal outcomes in Texas?
7:54–13:12
6
How do environmental and social pressures affect Black women’s health in Harris County?
13:12–15:08
7
What barriers keep Black women from turning political participation into representation?
15:08–17:30
8
What can a Harris County judge do to improve public health and maternal care?
17:30–21:16
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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