Olympic medalist Bowie death spotlights Black maternal mortality risk
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Olympic track stars aren’t supposed to die suddenly at age 32.
And especially not while eight months pregnant.
But that’s exactly what happened in May to sprinter Torie Bowie — a three-time Olympic medalist and former world champion — when she was found dead in her Winter Garden home after authorities conducted a wellness check.
According to a report released last month by the Orange County Medical Examiner’s Office, Bowie had a “well developed fetus” and was estimated to be eight months pregnant and in labor when she died.
The autopsy report noted respiratory distress and eclampsia as possible complications that contributed to Bowie’s death.
Preeclampsia is a pregnancy disorder in which a person who’s pregnant has high blood pressure and protein in their urine. According to Cleveland Clinic, eclampsia is a “rare but serious complication of preeclampsia.” It occurs when a person with preeclampsia develops seizures or convulsions during pregnancy.
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Tori Bowie’s death puts a spotlight on Black maternal health disparities
Bowie’s sudden death has put a spotlight on the racial health disparities that lead to a far higher risk for maternal health complications for Black people — regardless of socioeconomic status.
As advocate D’Andra Willis of the Black-centered reproductive justice group The Afiya Center told NBC News: “Maternal mortality for Black women has nothing to do with health or economic status. You could be the richest or the poorest, Black women are still three to five times more likely to die in childbirth than any poor white woman.”
Regina Davis Moss, president of the Black women-centered reproductive justice group In Our Own Voice, concurred with Willis: “If this is happening to an Olympic athlete who’s likely doing everything she can to have a healthy pregnancy, it’s happening to the everyday woman.”
NBC News also noted that “a 2023 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the richest Black women in the U.S. have worse maternal and infant health outcomes than the poorest white women.”
And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 2021 the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births — almost three times the rate for white women.
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Serena Williams, Beyoncé, Bowie’s teammates all endured high-risk pregnancies
After news of the circumstances around Bowie’s death broke, Allyson Felix — Bowie’s 2016 Olympics teammate on the U.S. gold-medal-winning 4×100-meter relay team — wrote a poignant piece in Time magazine about the difficulties she had in her own pregnancy.
“I developed preeclampsia during my pregnancy with my daughter Camryn, who was born in November 2018,” she wrote. “The doctors sent me to the hospital, where I would deliver Camryn during an emergency C-section, at 32 weeks. I was unsure if I was going to make it. If I was ever going to hold my precious daughter.”
Felix believes that more needs to be done to prepare Black women to understand the potential risks associated with their pregnancies: “Like so many Black women, I was unaware of the risks I faced while pregnant. When I became pregnant, my doctor didn’t sit me down and tell me, ‘these are things that you should look for in your pregnancy, because you are at a greater risk to experience these complications.’”
For instance, she noted that when she and her relatives spoke about having swollen feet during their pregnancies, none of them had been instructed that this was one of the early warning signs of preeclampsia.
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Felix also cited Beyoncé developing preeclampsia during pregnancy and the life-threatening circumstances surrounding tennis star Serena Williams’ delivery of daughter Olympia in 2017 (Williams underwent four surgeries, including an emergency C-section) as examples of prominent Black women who came perilously close to worst-case outcomes.
Williams, 41, revealed in May that she’s pregnant with her second child.
Racism, not race, a factor in pregnancy perils
According to the National Heart, Blood & Lung Institute (NIH), “systemic racism [is] a key risk factor for maternal death and illness” in Black and Native American women.
In 2021, Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, founder and president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, told the NIH that “our use of language and our desire to raise awareness about the huge inequities encroaching on the lives of Black women have conflated, even equated, Blackness and disease. Race is not a factor for illness and death, but racism, bias, and discrimination definitely are.”
Crear-Perry believes that “without proper context, social determinants lose their meaning and end up presenting disparities, such as Black women’s high rate of maternal mortality, as if they were natural phenomena.”
She stressed that “we haven’t really addressed the underlying root causes of the problem, so it’s easy for people to still blame and shame communities of color by using the social determinants frame.”
Crear-Perry posits that addressing Black maternal and infant mortality means better understanding the underlying causes of premature births: “We must look at the woman before pregnancy and undo the conditions that lead to unhealth.”
Research has also shown that Black and minority women often feel unheard and/or dismissed during their interactions with their healthcare providers — and that’s something that simply must change.
Whether that actually happens, only time will tell.
But if it doesn’t, then we’re destined to hear about more heartbreaking cases of preventable maternal and infant deaths.
As Felix noted in her Time essay, three of the four women on her gold-medal-winning relay team “set out to become mothers. All three of us — all Black women — had serious complications. Tianna Madison has shared that she went into labor at 26 weeks and entered the hospital ‘with my medical advance directive AND my will.’ Tori passed away. We’re dealing with a Black maternal health crisis. Here you have three Olympic champions, and we’re still at risk.”
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