How Unconscious Bias in Health Care Puts Pregnant Black Women at Higher Risk [nytimes.com]

^{Shakima Tozay, of Stanwood, Wash., held a portrait of her son, Jaxson, who died in the womb and was delivered via cesarean section.Credit...Chona Kasinger for The New York Times}

By Rony Carin Rabin, The New York Times, December 12, 2023

Shakima Tozay was 37 years old and six months pregnant when a nurse, checking the fetal heart rate of the baby boy she was carrying, referred to him as “a hoodlum.”

Ms. Tozay, a social worker, froze. She had just been hospitalized at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., with pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening complication of pregnancy, and she is Black.

“A ‘hoodlum’?” she said. “Why would you call him that?”

The fetus was 14 inches long and weighed little more than a box of chocolates.

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