The Room Should Have Been Safe: Black Women Deserve Better Care

Juneteenth is a day to honor the long arc of Black freedom in America. It is also a day to reckon with how far that arc still has to bend.

This Juneteenth, LOLA is continuing our commitment to health liberation and advocacy by shining a light on the disparities Black women face in America. We're amplifying the voices of Tah Mattison and Chelsea VonChaz, birth workers and maternal health advocates who have spent years holding space for Black women through birth and beyond. Chelsea is the founder of #HappyPeriod, an organization LOLA has proudly partnered with for years to provide access to safe menstrual care, and Tah is a longtime collaborator and contributor to the movement. Their stories are not abstractions. They are a mirror held up to a system that has failed Black women for generations, and a call to build something better.

From Tah Mattison Birth Worker and Postpartum Care Advocate

I have stood in living rooms, hospital hallways, and the quiet dark of early morning hours, holding space for Black women as they brought new life into the world. As a birth worker, I learned something early that took medicine far too long to admit: the environment is everything. 

What I witnessed again and again, especially within hospital systems, was that Black women were rarely given intentionality. Their pain was minimized. Their concerns were dismissed. And for far too many, that dismissal carried consequences no family should have to survive. 

When I walked into a birthing space, my first job wasn't clinical, it was relational. I had to create safety. I learned how to read a room, how to soften the edges of fear, how to help a mother feel seen before she felt managed. I learned that true support isn't about intervening, it's about being present with knowledge, warmth, and deep respect for the birthing person's body and autonomy. I developed products and care practices to support families through the full arc of birth and postpartum recovery, across home births, hospital births, and beyond. Not because I was lucky but because I was intentional. And because the women I served deserved nothing less. 

That is what every Black woman should be able to expect from the healthcare system she walks into. Not just technically competent care. Humanizing care. Care that starts with listening. Care that doesn't require her to fight to be taken seriously. 

Creating safety isn't a soft skill. For Black women in America, it is the difference between life and death.

The Numbers Don't Lie 

The disparities in Black women's healthcare in the United States are not a mystery; they are a documented, ongoing crisis rooted in structural racism, bias in clinical training, and a long history of medical exploitation. 

These aren't statistics about biology. They are statistics about belief specifically, about who gets believed when they say they are in pain. Maternal mortality, chronic misdiagnosis, delayed care, and dismissal of symptoms are not random. They follow a pattern shaped by race. 

From Chelsea VonChaz Doula and Founder, #HappyPeriod

I had known for years the kind of knowing that lives in your body, not in a chart. Debilitating cramps that left me on the floor. Bleeding so heavy it dictated what I could wear, where I could go, how I could show up in the world. I went to appointments. I described what was happening. And I was told, in various ways, to manage my expectations. It took far too long and required too much insistence on my part before anyone took the time to look and find what was already there: fibroids. Multiple. That experience didn't break me. But it did transform me. It made me ask the question I couldn't stop asking: If I, with my voice, access, and determination, was being dismissed this consistently, what was happening to women who had even less room to push back? The answer to that question is why I became a doula. It is why I built #HappyPeriod. 

This country does not respect melanated bodies. That is not rhetoric, it is a medical record, written across generations. When I say the processes of women's health in this country are barbaric, I mean it in the most precise sense of the word. The disparities Black women face are not accidents of an imperfect system. They are the system—inherited, institutionalized, and still largely unacknowledged. Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at rates three times higher than white women. We are less likely to have our pain taken seriously, more likely to receive delayed diagnoses, and more likely to leave appointments without answers. These patterns exist across income levels, education levels, zip codes.

Science has debunked the myth that Black women feel less pain—that our bodies are built differently or that we are somehow more resilient. But it was never really about science. It was about a system that needed justification. And that justification has a very specific origin. 

Historical Record

Anarcha. Lucy. Betsey. 

J. Marion Sims is widely called the "Father of Modern Gynecology." What is far less often taught is that his foundational surgical procedures were performed on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, without consent, and without the freedom to refuse. Anarcha alone underwent over 30 operations. Their bodies built a field that went on to exclude and harm women who looked like them. Recognizing their names and their involuntary contributions is not a footnote to medical history, it is the history. We cannot talk about Black women's healthcare today without acknowledging the foundation it was built upon.

I became a doula three Juneteenths ago. Becoming a doula was an act of resistance as much as it was a calling. I wanted to be the person in the room who already believed the patient. Who didn't require her to earn her pain or prove her symptoms. Who understood that for Black women, feeling safe in a medical space is not a given, it is something that must be actively built, person by person, hand-hold by hand-hold. 

#HappyPeriod exists because period poverty is a health crisis disproportionately borne by Black women and other marginalized communities, and because the conversation around menstrual health is still too often treated as a niche issue, rather than the fundamental dignity issue it is.

We distribute period products to those who lack consistent access. We drive cultural conversations that center the voices and experiences of the people most affected. And we hold the line on a simple but radical premise: that everybody deserves to be cared for. Not earned. Not negotiated. Cared for. 

This Juneteenth, I'm asking you to stand with us — because the work of liberation has always included the work of healing. Let us also commit to the work of health liberation, the radical idea that Black women's bodies are worthy of care, dignity, and safety from the very first appointment to the last postpartum visit. 

Sources:

*Working Together to Reduce Black Maternal Mortality," CDC, cdc.gov/womens-health/features/maternal-mortality.html   

**Source: KFF Survey on Racism, Discrimination, and Health (June 6-August 14, 2023) https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/five-facts-about-black-womens-experiences-in-health-care/ 

***Examining the Relationship between Social Determinants of Health and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes in Black Women," PMC/NIH, 2024. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10799964/ 

****Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 2022, cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2023/maternal-mortality-rates-2023.htm