Homicide is a leading cause of death in pregnant people, a new study finds. Black women are at greatest risk. [thelily.com]

By Cecilia Nowell, Illustration: iStock/Washington Post Illustration, The Lily, December 6, 2021

At the Safe Sisters Circle, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., founder and executive director Alana C. Brown said she has worked with “countless” survivors of intimate partner violence who were abused while pregnant. While providing legal services to survivors in the city’s predominantly Black Ward 7 and 8, Brown said she’s witnessed that sometimes the abuse isn’t only physical; she’s seen survivors miscarry from the stress of emotional abuse.

Earlier this year, Brown published an article with the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence detailing the specific ways that medical racism, a long legacy of discrimination and reproductive coercion have resulted in Black women facing some of the highest rates of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

So when she read a study published in November in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, which found that homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum people — and that Black women, and women and girls under the age of 25, were at the greatest risk — she wasn’t surprised, she said.

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