A single mum-of-12 died during childbirth days before Christmas and her heartbroken mother has been left to bring up all of the children.
Gran Patricia Pouncey, who lives in Detroit, Michigan, wants answers as to what happened to her 35-year-old daughter Nikita Washington.
Nikita had gone to Detroit's Harper University Hospital alone in December because her husband was locked up in prison.
She had a C-section on December 22 and gave birth to a healthy baby boy but died of complications following the surgery.
The death certificate said that she died from a "postpartum haemorrhage" and "complications from multiple Caesarean sections."
Ms Pouncey said: "I just have a lot of questions right now. I ask myself all the time, 'What went wrong?'"
She said they are still waiting for the result from the autopsy.
The gran added: "If she died naturally, I want to know. If one of them doctors did something, I wanna know that too. I'm hurt, I'm confused."
Nikita's children range from 3 months to 19. Ms Pouncey will now be left looking after them as they all struggle to come to terms with Nikita's death.
Discussing if she can raise them all, Ms Pouncey said: "I already thought about it, and I'm gonna fight to keep them together and keep them with me."
"I'm just stuck right now, " she added. "I have all 12 of her kids right now with me, so I got to get a bigger house because my house is too small."
Despite continual advances in modern medicines, childbirth can still be very dangerous for women.
The maternal mortality rate is increasing, according to the CDC.
The maternal mortality rate for 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with a rate of 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019.
This grim statistic is worse for women of colour.
In 2021, the maternal mortality rate for African American women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, 2.6 times the rate for white women.
In the UK a mum died giving birth to her second daughter.
It was later found Lucy Howell should not have been allowed a natural delivery, an inquest was told.
She had previously given birth to eldest daughter Rosie via a caesarean section, and then needed surgery to repair scarring.
However she died after suffering complications during the birth of her second child, Pippa, at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, Winchester, in March 2021.
The inquest heard Mrs Howell suffered an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE) and a ruptured uterus during delivery.
Although her daughter survived, Lucy passed away on March 12.
An inquest is now seeking to discover if Lucy would have survived if she had been advised to choose an alternative mode of birth, such as a second c-section.
