People's races have profound impacts on their health, but that's not because people of different backgrounds have fundamentally different biology. Rather, these social categories influence people's chances of being exposed to environmental stressors and pollution, of having limited access to health care, and of not being taken seriously in a doctor's office — including that of an obstetrician.
In this excerpt from "Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Ill" (Bloomsbury Circus, 2024), science journalist Layal Liverpool interrogates the anxieties that bubble up for her as she considers pregnancy. As a Black woman, trained biomedical scientist and journalist who covers the impacts of racism on medical care, she is well aware of how racism impacts people's experiences of pregnancy at every step of the journey. Her new book explores these widespread racial inequities in reproductive care, as well as those that exist in other aspects of health care, in medical education and in research. The text also profiles people working to close these gaps, and making great strides in doing so.
