Mekiya Hodges, who is African American and works as a social worker, says that pregnant women of colour often aren’t listened to by doctors.
She had a traumatic experience giving birth to her previous children in hospital and, along with the additional risk of coronavirus, decided to have her daughter, Jordan, at home with the help of Natalie Watson, co-founder of Steel City Midwives.
Mekiya, 25, lives in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an area that has a high death rate for new black mothers.
Nationally, black women in 2018 were two and half times more likely than white women to die due to complications related to pregnancy or childbirth.
