Sen. Warren says medical personnel don’t treat Black women like they do other women

There’s no doubt that many of the candidates for president are courting Black people – Black women in particular – for their votes in the 2020 elections. One of those candidates is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. In a recent campaign speech, she made it apparent she believes that doctors and nurses don’t treat Black women the same as they do White women, reports Fox News. Warren appeared on Wednesday together with a number of other 2020 Democratic candidates at the She The People Forum in Houston, discussing issues concerning women of color. The Massachusetts senator announced on stage a plan to decrease the childbirth mortality rate among Black women while identifying a systematic problem with how they are treated. “And there is a specific problem, as you rightly identified, for women of color who are three, four times more likely to die in childbirth,” Warren said. “And here’s the thing, even after we do the adjustments for income, for education, this is true across the board. This is true for well-educated African American women, for wealthy African American women, and the best studies that I’m seeing put it down to just one thing, prejudice,” she added. “That doctors and nurses don’t hear African American women’s medical issues the same way that they hear the same things from White women.” Warren went on to get into details of her plan, noting that hospitals will be given bonuses if they manage to reduce the childbirth mortality rate among Black women in an effort to give financial incentives for those doctors and nurses to provide better care. “And if they don’t, then they’re going to have money taken away from them,” Warren added. “I want to see the hospitals see it as their responsibility to address this problem head-on and make it a first priority. The best way to do that is to use the money to make it happen because we gotta have change, and we gotta have change now.”