A popular narrative blaming racism for black maternal health disparities has been the subject of debunking efforts for years. Nevertheless, a top advocate of that conspiracy theory remains a celebrated speaker, writer, and continuing medical education (CME) contributor.
Later this week, Joia Crear-Perry, MD, will serve as keynote speaker at the inaugural Wyoming Maternal Health Summit, sponsored by the University of Wyoming College of Health Sciences’ Rural Health Institute.
Crear-Perry’s remarks will contribute to the summit’s theme, “Closing the Distance: Maternal Health Access and Innovation in Wyoming,” and will consider the alleged “challenges Wyoming faces” including “systemic factors driving preventable maternal deaths.”
In one sense, Crear-Perry is an obvious choice for such an event, having founded the National Birth Equity Collaborative (NBEC), a “nationally recognized organization on the front lines of the Black maternal health & infant mortality crises.”
Yet the “highly sought-after trainer & speaker” is, in another sense, a strange and disappointing choice. The theory of systemic racism and black maternal mortality that she advances relies on bad science and a misunderstanding of statistical data.
Do No Harm staffers have done much of the necessary debunking ourselves.
Whereas Crear-Perry argues that “Race Isn’t a Risk Factor in Maternal Health. Racism Is,” we demonstrate that having a doctor of the same race doesn’t improve patients’ healthcare outcomes.
Whereas Crear-Perry’s NBEC states that, “[i]n comparison to other high-income countries, the U.S. has the highest maternal … mortality rates despite the most healthcare spending, & [that] most of these deaths are preventable,” we explain that the U.S. rate may result from a reporting system that overestimates maternal deaths and whose metrics are not fully comparable to those of other developed nations given how deaths are ascertained.
Whereas Crear-Perry blames “exposure to racism” for the alleged fact that “Black women in the United States are the most likely of this country’s women to die from pregnancy-related complications,” we show that such a claim diverts resources from proper channels in an attempt to address “a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes.”
Moreover, we explain how activists have traditionally misinterpreted the CDC data that undergird the systemic-racism theory of black maternal mortality. To wit,
it’s hard to draw society-wide conclusions from such a small sample. It’s even harder when you recognize that the CDC statistics include deaths that occurred up to a year after delivery, as well as those caused by underlying and preexisting medical conditions that pregnancy may have aggravated. And the CDC admits that the systems for identifying mortality rates are prone to error.
Given the flaws in her argument, Crear-Perry ought not to be the fêted and “highly sought-after” medical “expert” (read: activist) that contemporary racial anxieties have made her. Alas, her work as a speaker, educator, and medical celebrity is going smashingly.
In addition to her upcoming Wyoming address, Crear-Perry has participated in a CME opportunity offered to physicians by the American Medical Association. In that video session, “Prioritizing Equity: The Root Cause,” Crear-Perry contends that “[r]acism, classism, and gender oppression” are the “root causes” not only of health inequities but of “most all inequities in the United States of America.”
Crear-Perry has been celebrated in a 2021 Lancet article, “Joia Crear-Perry: collaborating for racial and reproductive justice,” which boasts that she “works on ‘reframing the conversation’ about race to develop a ‘shared vocabulary and understanding of why health inequities exist’ because ‘it’s really racism that is causing the harm.’”
We will not argue that there is any insincerity in Crear-Perry’s “racism” theorizing. She very clearly believes what she preaches.
And let’s also be clear: Maternal mortality is a serious matter deserving of thoughtful, evidence-based study. As Do No Harm has previously written, policymakers and the medical community ought to be focusing their efforts on better hospital training programs for responding to complications and greater use of prenatal care, not looking around every corner for alleged physician bias.
Yet it is just as obviously the case that the woke takeover of the medical establishment has made Crear-Perry’s message irresistible, never mind its poor basis in science.
Crear-Perry’s fame, in other words, is a mere symptom. The widespread — indeed, the “systemic” — eagerness to embrace progressive ideological narratives in medicine is the disease.
