By: Janelle Bolden, MD

This week is Black Maternal Health Week and it couldn’t be a more important time to highlight the concerns regarding Black mothers. I am Black. I am a mom. I am also a Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM) physician. I know firsthand the dire situation we are in.

By: Mae Winchester, MD

The exact same day that I diagnosed Trisomy 13 in a highly desired first pregnancy was the same day I learned that a dangerous piece of legislation, inappropriately known as the “Value Them Both Act,” was moving quickly through the Kansas state legislature.

By: Megan Lord, MD

I recently took care of a pregnant woman - we will call her Rosa - who had emigrated to the United States from Central America. In a previous pregnancy, disaster had struck. The fetus had abnormal kidneys, which could not make urine. Amniotic fluid is mostly fetal urine and is needed to help the fetal lungs develop. Thus if a fetus has kidneys that do not function, they often develop lungs that do not function. Despite all of the wonders of modern medicine, nothing could be done that would allow this fetus to survive outside of the womb. He was delivered alive and died six hours later. Rosa went home without her child, heartbroken.

By: Elise Boos, MD, MSc, Fellow at Physicians for Reproductive Health

I come from a large Cajun Catholic family in Louisiana – a boisterous, flood-resistant, costuming bunch who are experts at navigating the water ways and the streets of New Orleans by bike when parades make driving impossible. We all got married in Catholic Churches, as was expected, but on Sundays when the Saints have a noon game, no one goes to Church at all. We are a political grab bag in a liberal city nestled in a conservative state.