Serena Williams is boldly doing what many mothers are shamed out of doing: telling her birth story. And she’s doing so to spread awareness of the difficulty women, especially Black women, have navigating the healthcare system. The tennis star penned a powerful essay excerpted in Elle —adapted from the new anthology Arrival Stories: Women Share Their Experiences of Becoming Mothers — in which she details what went from an enjoyable pregnancy, to an intense birthing experience, to a nightmare with near-deadly consequences after her baby was delivered via emergency c-section.
Historically, women are less believed by medical professionals on everything from their pain levels to what they’re experiencing psychologically, and they’re often dismissed as a result. Harvard reported in 2017 that while women statistically experience chronic pain in higher numbers, most pain studies are done on men. The word hysteria even derives from the Greek word for uterus, linguistically linking women’s pain to hysterics. And it’s even worse for Black women, who — as Williams noted in her essay — are almost three times more likely to die during or after childbirth as white women. Medical racism is real, and Williams was almost a casualty of a backwards, deadly system. “Giving birth to my baby, it turned out, was a test for how loud and how often I would have to call out before I was finally heard,” she wrote of her experience.
