A civil rights inquiry concerning the treatment of Black women giving delivery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles is ongoing.
The Biden-Harris administration has made maternal health a top priority, and the HHS Office for Civil Rights is working on it nationwide to promote justice and equality in healthcare. We have no more comment in order to preserve the integrity of this ongoing inquiry, the US Department of Health and Human Services said CNN in a statement.
After his wife Kira passed away in 2016 while visiting the hospital to give birth to their second son, Charles Johnson IV filed a civil rights complaint against Cedars-Sinai in May 2022. This prompted the government inquiry. Following a planned caesarean section, an autopsy revealed Johnson died from severe internal haemorrhage, according to a prior CNN report.
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According to the lawsuit, Johnson’s civil rights were violated and she was denied medical care due to her race, “which resulted in her untimely and wrongful death.”
Cedars-Sinai declined to comment on the federal civil rights investigation specifically, but in a statement to CNN, the hospital said, “Cedars-Sinai clinicians, leaders, and researchers have long been concerned with national disparities in Black maternal health, and we are proud of the work we’ve done (and continue to do) to address these issues in Los Angeles as well as at the state and national levels.”
The Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre previously stated that it applauded Johnson “for the attention he has brought to the crucial subject of racial disparities in maternity outcomes. Although federal privacy rules forbid us from directly commenting on any patient’s care, we have a long-standing commitment to making any changes necessary to guarantee that patients receive the best possible care.
Since decades, black women’s maternal mortality rates in the US have been climbing significantly, according to a previous CNN study. According to the CDC, Black mothers will be nearly three times more likely than White mothers to pass away from pregnancy-related problems in 2021, with 69.9 fatalities per 100,000 live births. The CDC discovered that a number of factors, such as underlying chronic diseases, institutional racism, and implicit bias, contribute to the racial disparities revealed in the data.