By Alexis Taylor
AFRO Managing Editor
ataylor@afro.com
Disparity…in action.
Jones Credit: Screenshot courtesy of Tik Tok / kashman2814. Well credit: Screenshot courtesy of Meta (Facebook) / Leon Wells
Those were the words that came to mind as I watched a video of Kiara Jones writhing in the pain of active labor, but being forced to complete hospital paperwork instead of receiving care.
By now, more than 58 million have witnessed the disgusting scene that played out at Dallas Regional Medical Center in Mesquite, Texas: A Black woman, 12 minutes before bringing a new life into the world, doing her best to answer the questions of a stoic, White nurse with a clear deficit in compassion and care.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “In 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births and was significantly higher than rates for White (14.5), Hispanic (12.4), and Asian (10.7) women.”
If you’re wondering why Black women are more than three times as likely to die in childbirth– this video is your answer. These women aren’t being bashed over the head, or pushed to the ground in the throws of a contraction. No, some of them are simply left in the waiting room, held up during intake or turned away all together for one bias or another when they should be receiving care.
Jones’ mother took to the Tik Tok social media platform, providing a peek behind the veil on how Black women are harmed in the care of licensed medical professionals. Under the name kashman2814, she documented the actual treatment that easily could have led to yet another Black maternal death to be aggregated for next year’s medical journals.
The videos show Jones in tears, doing her best to work with a nurse, who has been outed on social media as Lacrista Vaughn. In a follow-up post, Jones’ mother, identified as Kash Manuel in a Go Fund Me petition, explained the ordeal in more detail.
In the subsequent video, Manuel speaks on how her daughter was supposed to be induced on the day that her water ultimately broke. The family calls, but they are repeatedly told the hospital allegedly has no beds. When Jones’ labor naturally starts, Manuel says she called the hospital to ensure medical professionals were prepared for a mother with a baby on the way and headed to the facility with her daughter.
After being turned away from the ambulance entrance, Manuel says she drove to the front entrance and ran inside begging for help. Let’s pause here.
If what Manuel says is true– and I do not doubt her account– these medical professionals saw a woman in active labor and put her life at risk because…she’s at the wrong entrance? It’s more than sad. It’s maddening and it should be illegal. How many women go into cardiac arrest or have a blood clot travel in the moments they are making their way to the right entrance? I’d say this is an instance where it’s less about the “right” or “wrong” entrance and more about the right or wrong skin color.
Upon hearing Manuel’s call for help at the front entrance, a nurse brings a wheelchair to the door, but that’s as much as she is willing to help.
“I said, ‘excuse me, you’re not gonna come with me?’ And she was like, ‘no,’” Manuel recounts. Eventually a police officer watching the situation helps Jones while Manuel parks her car. She returns, expecting to see the rush of a department about to deliver her grandchild.
Instead, she finds her daughter “just there…with a stack of papers in her hand. Screaming…‘this baby is coming.’”
“I look at the registers behind a window, and they’re looking at me, and they say, ‘well, we can’t do anything until she signs the papers,’” says Manuel.
The charge nurse allegedly comes out, but seeing incomplete paperwork, Manuel says she closes the door until her daughter is able to scribble her name on all the papers. Still, it’s not enough.
“The charge nurse, she opened up the door. My daughter is literally like, having a contraction. And she’s just standing there in the door…I said, ‘can we get her into labor and delivery?’ She said, ‘no…I have to do the paperwork and get her a band before we can send her upstairs.’”
And there you have it. This is how Black women die in the birthing process. This is why the CDC reports “80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable.”
It’s not a woman with a predisposed condition. It’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate decision to not deliver quality care. It’s a false belief that Black women are “more dramatic,” or lying about their symptoms.
Though many believe Nurse Vaughn has been fired, that has not been confirmed. AFRO requests for interview or comment sent to the Dallas Regional Medical Center’s communications manager, Vince Falsarella, were answered with the following statement:
“At Dallas Regional Medical Center, the safety, dignity, and well-being of our patients are always our highest priorities. We are committed to providing compassionate, high-quality care to every person who comes through our doors, and we are reviewing this situation to understand what occurred. Due to patient privacy laws, we cannot share further details at this time, but our focus remains on ensuring that every patient receives the attentive, respectful care they deserve.”
To add insult to injury, this wasn’t even the only case of alleged neglect documented this month. Mercedes Wells says she gave birth on the side of an Indiana road on Nov. 16 after a nurse discharged her from Franciscan Health Crown Point, refusing to believe her daughter was moments away from crowning.
“I begged to stay while upstairs in labor and delivery triage. Cried out to the entire nurses station. Not 1 oz of empathy by of the nursing staff!” says Wells, in a social media post about the incident. “I was treated so poorly and inhuman. I still can’t believe it.”
Eight minutes after being kicked out of the hospital, Wells gave birth. She had no medical professionals on hand to help her if there had been a complication for her or her daughter.
Franciscan Health Crown Point, located just over the Indiana border, sent a statement to the AFRO from Raymond Grady, CEO and president. Grady said he is “aware of the video and the concerns expressed on social media” and that he would “take appropriate action” after a review of the incident.
Watching these videos, I am immediately taken to the case of how Judge Glenda Hatchett’s daughter in-law died in 2016 in California.
In a testimony heard by the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Health, Charles Johnson, Judge Hatchett’s son, detailed how he watched his wife slowly deteriorate for ten hours after alerting medical staff to blood in his wife’s catheter.
“We were told by the medical staff at Cedars Sinai Kira was not a priority and we waited for her CT scan to be done,” he said.
In this trigger happy nation, there was little he– as a Black man in a hospital setting– could do.
By the time nurses came to get Kira Johnson, she had three liters of blood pooled in her stomach.
She died from the internal bleeding, leaving behind two children.
This is why more and more Black women are returning to midwives and birthing and post-partum doulas who believe them, listen and respond with care.
Americans want to believe this is the greatest country in the world. But for Black, pregnant women like Kiara Jones, Mercedes Wells and Kira Johnson, this land is little more than a house of horrors.
It’s time for our legislators– and our prosecutors– to do something. Suspension is not enough. Firing is not enough. The Lacrista Vaughns of the world need to lose their licenses, with a ban on ever working in the health care setting again. And I believe a criminal charge or two for the neglect shown on camera would go a long way in curbing the unrecorded behaviors that silently add bodies to the tally of Black women that die in or shortly after child birth each year.
