Shamony Gibson spent the final months of her life excitedly anticipating the birth of her second child. “Time is flying, four months already,” she says in a home video collage at the beginning of Aftershock, a new documentary about the black maternal health crisis in the US. “Every day is a new process, you wake up like, ‘Oh my god, I’m that much closer to being a mom again.’”
Gibson, a 30-year-old resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave birth to her son, Khari, in September 2019 via c-section. For days afterwards, she complained of shortness of breath. She and her partner, Omari Maynard, repeatedly called doctors, who told her it was fine, just relax.
