Neha Sivakumaran

Birth stories: understanding racial disparity in pregnancy through biography and autobiography

Started Sept. 6, 2024

Abstract or project description

Neha is investigating racial disparities in maternal health outcomes in the United States (she may narrow her focus geographically when she’s identified the core sources). Through an initial review of the literature, which is vast, it became obvious that the fact of racial disparities in maternal health outcomes is not contested. Through reading a foundational text, Pregnant While Black, Neha expressed an interest in the autobiographical and biographical accounts written by (or about) Black women, which provide a more humanized and personal insight into the crisis in maternal mortality in the U.S. and the ways in which it is racialized. Given this, Neha has decided to pursue a comparative analysis of first- and second-hand accounts of Black women’s experiences moving through the healthcare system while pregnant. Drawing on approaches from critical literary analysis, Neha will read these texts (or in the case of oral histories, listen to the narratives), and analyze them for theme, motif, shared or divergent expressions of feeling, and the textured descriptions of how racial discrimination shows up for Black women while they are pregnant and specifically seeking medical care. Neha will then contextualize her analysis of these narratives and accounts within the secondary literature, as a way of exploring what the stories reveal that might be missing from academic studies of these issues.