ON Monday, a very important debate relating to black maternal healthcare and mortality took place, led by MP Catherine McKinnell. Shocking statistics show that black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women, mixed heritage women three more times as likely, and Asian women two more times as likely. These are the kind of statistics that make you sit up and wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Why have we let down women from ethnic minority backgrounds so badly? This particular petition was brought to parliament to examine the horrendous racial disparities in maternal care and discuss how to close this gap between black and white women’s experience of childbirth within the NHS. The data is sourced from the latest 2020 MBRRACE-UK report on the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths 2016-18 which highlights the number of maternities and associated deaths by ethnicity and makes for shocking reading. It is all the more appalling given the UK Government’s recent race report which tried to pretend that structural racism doesn’t exist. There’s a lot of that about at the moment, saying issues don’t exist when sections of society know that it is these very issues that they have to deal with every single day of their lives.