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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Kamala Harris again earns over twice as much as Joe Biden, tax returns show

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      Kamala Harris again earns over twice as much as Joe Biden, tax returns showThe vice-president and her husband reported a gross income of $1.7m while the Bidens made $611,000 Kamala Harris and her husband earned more than twice as much as Joe Biden and his wife did last year, according to copies of their income tax returns released on Friday.Harris and the so-called second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, reported a federal adjusted gross income of about $1.7m in 2021, which was about the same they claimed to have earned the prior year. More

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      Much ado about Doug: second gentleman takes spotlight at Shakespeare debate

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      Much ado about Doug: second gentleman takes spotlight at Shakespeare debate Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, argues in a mock trial hosted by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and presided over by Stephen Breyer“I haven’t been in court for a few years, so excuse me if I’m a bit rusty,” said Doug Emhoff. “You know, not too much has changed in my life – except for the Secret Service, Air Force Two, the selfies, the cameras following me everywhere, and oh: my wife is the vice-president of the United States.”Mood as light as spring air as Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers words to rememberRead moreThe theatre erupted in whoops and clapping. Kamala Harris, sitting in the fifth row with her sister Maya, blew kisses through a black face mask and applauded her husband.It was one of those only-in-Washington moments. On Monday, the Shakespeare Theatre Company hosted a “mock trial” inspired by William Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing and presided over by retiring supreme court justice and good sport Stephen Breyer.Much Ado is best known for Beatrice and Benedick, two proud intellects who only fall in love after others play Cupid. That seemed fitting for Harris and Emhoff, who were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend and married just shy of their 50th birthdays.But the question before the not-so-serious court was: should Margaret be held liable for Don John’s defamation of Hero? Emhoff, who was a prominent entertainment lawyer for nearly 30 years, was lead advocate on Margaret’s behalf.The event, full of inside-the-Beltway topical gags, had been due to take place last month but was postponed after the second gentleman came down with coronavirus.“I thank your honours for granting my motion for a continuance due to plague,” began Emhoff, wearing a dark suit, blue shirt and blue tie, and standing at a lectern under bright stage lights. “The White House apothecary told me my symptoms would be wild but – whew!”The mock trial is a longstanding Shakespeare Theatre Company tradition but had gone virtual for the past couple of years, due to the pandemic. Monday marked a return to an in-person audience at the Sidney Harman Hall but it was also livestreamed.Emhoff, an amiable and slightly goofy presence, remarked: “My parents tonight are watching the livestream but I might have told them that I was arguing in front of the United States supreme court so, cameraperson, can you just keep a very tight shot … ?”The second gentleman faced quick-fire questioning from Breyer and four leading judges from the District of Columbia and Virginia.“How do you define woman?” asked one, a nod to the recent esoteric questioning of the supreme court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by Republican senators.Tongue firmly in cheek, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she was interested in Beatrice and Benedick.“He says he doesn’t want to marry anyone but I think it’s clear from the text that his real concern is that if he marries somebody who’s really pretty and is really smart and witty, she could turn out to be the one who is better known and more prominent than he is.”There was laughter from the audience. There was more when Emhoff responded dryly: “As I say, your honour, I used to be somebody.”The judges – relishing a chance to let their hair down – also made references to Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, Downton Abbey, Republicans Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.Emhoff was careful not get too political. One judge asked: “So when Beatrice tore up her love letters, making them unavailable to investigators, was that a violation of the imperial records act? If so, is Merrick Garland going to get around to that?”The second gentleman demurred: “There’s certain things I’m not allowed to talk about.”Simon Godwin: how the British director is taking on US theatreRead moreBut he did take a deft swipe at Donald Trump’s oldest son, during his defence of Margaret.“She was just an unwitting pawn in the scheme of the real villain here, the self-described villain: Don Jr – I mean, Don John.”The case against Margaret was put by Debra Katz, a DC litigator and founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks. The judges and the theatre audience ruled in her favour, whereas the audience watching via livestream sided with Emhoff.Harris then took to the stage, gave Emhoff a hug, posed for photos and and spoke with those assembled including Britain’s Simon Godwin, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company.Someone managed to get a selfie with Emhoff before the Secret Service trod the boards and encouraged Harris to exit, stage right.TopicsUS politicsThe US politics sketchKamala HarrisDemocratsWilliam ShakespeareTheatrenewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden vows to tackle ‘grave threat’ of untraceable ‘ghost guns’ – as it happened

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      Modi call ‘constructive’, White House says, but no agreement over Russian oil

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      Biden announces ghost gun restrictions, seeks to end ‘terrible fellowship of loss’

      Joe Biden said it was “basic common sense” to want untraceable, so-called ghost guns off the street, during a White House address to announce new firearms restrictions.
      In an event at the Rose Garden attended by numerous survivors and families of victims of gun violence, the president said he was clamping down on the kit-form guns to try to prevent others joining the “terrible fellowship of loss.”
      He also took a swipe at Republicans in Congress, and the gun rights lobby, including the national rifle association (NRA), that have opposed his efforts to enact reform.
      “The gun lobby tried to tie up the regulations and paperwork for a long, long time. The NRA called this rule I’m about to announce extreme,” Biden said. More

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      ‘I keep hope alive’: Tamara Tunie on playing Kamala Harris in political dystopia The 47th

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      Interview‘I keep hope alive’: Tamara Tunie on playing Kamala Harris in political dystopia The 47thArifa Akbar The Law & Order: SVU star is returning to the stage in a White House satire set in 2024. She talks about the ‘black-lash’ after Obama’s election, brokering a new deal for Broadway diversity – and her role as Whitney Houston’s mumTamara Tunie is limbering up to play the vice-president of America in Mike Bartlett’s new political satire, The 47th. “I have great admiration for what she’s achieved,” says Tunie, in a back office at the Old Vic in London, emanating a big, easygoing exuberance that seems Californian in spirit, although she is a New Yorker. So how is she preparing for the role of Kamala Harris: observing her public persona to mimic her convincingly?“No, I don’t try to impersonate – I find that could get in the way,” says Tunie, who appears utterly at ease with the part. Perhaps that’s because she is no stranger to playing true-life characters – including Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, in the upcoming biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. “I go to good old YouTube to see what interviews I can find,” she says of her research. “But what I look for more is the essence of the person: there might be one or two things that are significantly them – a quirk, something that they do. What I try to do is land on that but then allow myself the freedom to go: ‘What if they were in this situation?’”Bartlett’s drama finds Harris in 2024 in a world still dominated by the Trump family. It is a funny, horrifying political dystopia, much of it written in iambic pentameter with sly Shakespearean references tucked in. The reality of living through the Trump administration was sobering for Tunie. “This undercurrent of racism and misogyny was always there. What Trump allowed was the Pandora’s Box to be flung open … We must remain vigilant, and we must constantly fight, and we can never just relax and think ‘OK, everything is taken care of.’”Does she think America began relaxing during the Obama years? “Absolutely. The point when President Obama was elected was when the term ‘post-racial’ was coined. That was, unfortunately, a fantasy that everything was all fixed, because now we had a black president. What we are seeing – and one of the reasons I believe that Trump was elected – was that there was a backlash. In my circle we called it ‘black-lash’.”Tunie was born and raised in Pittsburgh, one of six siblings whose parents ran a funeral home. Her mother was also the first black female security guard at United States Steel and had a strong activist streak: “She believed that if there was something that needs to be addressed, you don’t wait for somebody else to do it.” Her father had a second job as an airport porter. Tunie was an all-rounder at school who loved singing and dancing but was fiercely academic, with ambitions to become a medic (she has played a medical examiner for more than 20 years in the TV drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit).What made her swerve into the performing arts was a single, thrilling moment, in the choir of a spring concert at high school. “I had a solo number and I got a standing ovation. It occurred to me that ‘This makes people really happy, it is something I love to do, and I can touch people with it.’”She won admission to the prestigious drama school at Carnegie Mellon University and made her Broadway debut in 1981. Feeling potentially pigeonholed as a musical performer, she stopped singing and dancing for a while. “I was classically trained. I wanted to do Shakespeare, I wanted to do straight plays, film and television. So for a good eight years or so I didn’t sing at all.”What was it like to return to singing for her part as Cissy Houston, one among a family of women with phenomenal voices, filmed last year? “Utterly intimidating. A lot of people don’t know that I sing, but the music that inspires me is in the jazz vein. Cissy Houston is more an amazing singer of gospel and R&B.” Tunie re-trained her vocals to “find” the character with the help of a musical team which included Rickey Minor, Whitney’s musical director.The 47th is the first live show Tunie has done since the beginning of the pandemic but she used the shutdown to build a campaign for better inclusivity within the theatre community. As part of Black Theatre United, the organisation which Tunie co-founded with fellow black professionals, a “New Deal for Broadway” was secured last year, which established industry-wide standards for equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. “This was a product of six months of meetings with the leaders in the industry: theatre owners, producers, creatives, casting directors. It is not a legal document but an agreement that is saying we as a community are going to address the exclusions of black people and make the industry much more inclusive.”Has she seen change more generally across screen and stage in recent years? Yes, but it has come very slowly and with a lot of pain. And even then it could flip back, she says, returning to her point about remaining vigilant. “But what I see in Hollywood are black individuals who have their own production companies, and black people making their own content, with Hollywood calling on them. There is Shonda Rhimes and the incredible dynasty she has built … I see that here, too [in the UK] – I worked with Michaela Coel in Black Earth Rising and she is very much the example of what I’m talking about.”On the subject of trailblazing women, has she ever met Harris? “I was on a Zoom with some other black women [during the presidential campaign] and she chatted with us, sharing some of her thoughts and policies for the future of the country. I found her utterly engaging.” So Harris for president? “As Jesse Jackson would say, ‘I keep hope alive.’ [To be vice-president] is a monumental accomplishment and I feel like it’s another rung in the ladder towards equality and space for not just a woman but a woman of colour to be the president of the United States. That would be the best thing for the country.”
      The 47th is at the Old Vic, London, from 29 March to 28 May.
      TopicsTheatreMike BartlettOld Vic TheatreKamala HarrisUS politicsTelevisionWhitney HoustoninterviewsReuse this content More

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      Jill Biden criticized husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate, book says

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      Jill Biden criticized husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate, book says‘Why do we have to choose someone who attacked Joe?’ first lady reportedly said, according to This Will Not Pass The first lady, Jill Biden, complained about her husband’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate and now vice-president, according to a new book, asking: “There are millions of people in the United States. Why … do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic StateRead moreThe quote is contained in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, which is due to be published on 3 May.Excerpts have already been reported. Jill Biden’s reported remark was relayed by Politico on Tuesday.Harris made her mark in the Democratic primary – and bruised Biden – at a debate in Miami in June 2019, criticising his opposition to bussing, a way of racially integrating public schools, as a young senator in the 1970s.01:39Biden was reportedly hurt by the insinuation he had been racist but still picked the California senator as his running mate and ultimately the first woman and person of color to be vice-president.A spokesman for Jill Biden, Michael Larosa, told Politico: “Many books will be written on the 2020 campaign, with countless retellings of events – some accurate, some inaccurate. The first lady and her team do not plan to comment on any of them.”Promising “juicy excerpts” of the new politics book, Politico said Martin and Burns offer extensive accounts of Harris’s struggles as vice-president. As allies complained about her “impossible” portfolio, including border security, the news website said, “Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director, not only grew tired of the criticism that the White House was mismanaging Harris – she blamed the VP.”Martin and Burnswrite: “In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice-presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice-president’s staff.”Bedingfield told Politico: “The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact-check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know. Vice-President Harris is a force in this administration and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward.”Harris, the book says, does not want only to work on issues connected to women and Black Americans. In her attempts to lead the way on voting rights, however, she reportedly felt stymied by Biden’s reluctance to commit to serious Senate reform.Burns and Martin also report that Biden and Harris are “friendly but not close”, but say the president grew frustrated with leaks about Harris, warning aides that if “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice-president … they would quickly be former staff”.The authors say Harris’s frustration was “up in the stratosphere”, according to an unnamed senator who “lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy’. Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”Biden, the oldest president ever inaugurated for the first time, will turn 82 shortly after the 2024 election. He has said he intends to run again.Whatever the accuracy of the reporting by Martin and Burns, it seems Harris may have cause to agree with a famous judgment by John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin D Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941. The vice-presidency, Garner said, “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss”.TopicsJoe BidenKamala HarrisJill BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More