Commentary

State-Backed Pregnancy Course is Chock-Full of DEI 

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • October 21, 2025

Back in 2023, Do No Harm research revealed that the University of Minnesota had paid an organization called Diversity Science (now the Humanitas Institute) $219,633 to create a continuing medical education course whose purpose was to “empower perinatal care providers with the foundational knowledge, insights and skills they need to ensure that Black and Indigenous women and birthing people receive fully equitable patient-centered, respectful, high-quality care free of bias and discrimination.”

The course, called “Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth,” is intended for employees at Minnesota hospitals and birthing centers who work with pregnant or postpartum patients.

Now, the latest update of the course is out – and as one might expect, it’s rife with DEI, ideology, and dubious medical concepts. 

Central to the course’s themes is the notion that ameliorating “implicit/unconscious bias” in healthcare providers, specifically white healthcare providers, can improve health outcomes for minority patients. This argument in turn relies on the premise that providers’ unconscious biases negatively impact the health outcomes of minority patients.

For instance, the course opens with the graphic below suggesting that unconscious bias is a key driver for racial disparities in health outcomes.

Figure 1. A slide on health inequities and unconscious bias from the Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth course.

There is simply no evidence to support this claim. 

The primary tool to assess an individual’s ostensible implicit bias, the Implicit Association Test or IAT, has been shown to have little predictive value.

“Twenty years of research produced very little evidence that the IAT test predicts any real-world behaviour,” University of Toronto Mississauga psychology professor Ulrich Schimmack, who spent years studying implicit bias, said in 2019. “On top of that, some of the articles that claim it does, on close inspection, fail to show that.”

Nevertheless, the course suggests “evidence-based mind hacks” for healthcare professionals to employ to prevent this “unconscious bias” from affecting the care they provide.

Figure 2. A slide on unconscious bias from the Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth course.

This is so troubling as it’s a tacit accusation, utterly lacking in evidentiary basis, that healthcare professionals harbor secret prejudices.

Clearly, this sows distrust and division within the healthcare system.

But that’s not all; not satisfied with advancing the unsupported notion that implicit bias negatively affects health outcomes, the course dips its toes into racial concordance.

In a video that plays at the end, the course narrator makes the following claims:

“Furthermore, studies show that white doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals often display warmer and friendlier verbal and non-verbal behavior toward white patients than toward patients of other races and ethnicities. This means that your black and other minority or marginalized patients and their families may have had deeply disappointing experiences with healthcare. They may be afraid that provider bias will get in the way of their care.”

While it’s unclear exactly which studies the course is referring to, it doesn’t really matter: the implication that minority patients face worse health outcomes when treated by white healthcare professionals is completely false.

The course is gesturing at the notion that racial concordance – in which patients are treated by providers of the same race – improves health outcomes, a notion that runs against the weight of the current evidence.

Do No Harm’s December 2023 report on this issue examined the literature on racial concordance and highlighted the fact that four out of five systematic reviews found no evidence to support the claim that racial concordance produces positive health outcomes.

Another recent review published in the Substance Use & Addiction Journal found inadequate evidence to support the notion that racial concordance improves health outcomes for black patients in addiction treatment.

Nevertheless, the course continues to suggest that biases held by white healthcare professionals negatively impact minority patients’ health outcomes.

Figure 3. A slide detailing “evidence-based” strategies to prevent racial biases in the Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth course.

For instance, the course proposes a hypothetical in which a white nurse tells a black male individual to “calm down” when begging for her to help a patient, and asks why the nurse acted that way.

Figure 4. A slide suggesting potential stereotypes in the Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth course.

One of the options is the following statement: “White people are prone to interpreting even neutral expressions on Black faces as angry or hostile.”

Course participants must select all of the options above if they wish to be completely correct.

Figure 5. A slide suggesting potential stereotypes in the Dignity in Pregnancy & Childbirth course.

In short, this course is advancing debunked academic concepts that reinforce a vision of the healthcare system completely divorced from reality.

This is in itself harmful, and has no place in medical education.