This story is part of an investigative series and new documentary, The A-Word, by The Independent examining the state of abortion access and reproductive care in the US after the fall of Roe v Wade.
Erica Allen was terrified and in agony last April at a Delaware hospital just before the emergency birth of her fourth child, fully aware of the dangers of being a Black mother in America. She kept thinking about her cousin: a Black doctor who’d collapsed at the mall and died while pregnant two years earlier, losing the son she’d already named Cruz.
