At age 30, Jeanine Valrie-Logan was having a miscarriage.

The room was sterile, cold. Guarded only by a curtain to maintain a semblance of privacy and a thin hospital gown, she sat waiting for the procedure that would remove the remaining pregnancy tissue. [Chicago Tribune]

As she stood to sit atop the bed that would wheel her to the operating room, the physician asked her, “Do you want me to give you an IUD, so you don’t have any more unplanned pregnancies?”

The question stopped her in her tracks, and the fear and loneliness she’d been feeling suddenly replaced with profound anger.

“Who said this was an unwanted pregnancy?” she recalled thinking at the time. “I remember grabbing the nurse and being like, ‘Please do not let him put an IUD in.’”

Upon waking from the operation, she was told by a supervising nurse that throughout her sleep, she continuously repeated the phrase “Don’t let him take my uterus. Don’t let him take my uterus.”

The urgent pleas for control over one’s body have been echoed by Black women across Chicago and the country over the course of the nation’s history. Following the death this spring of U.S. Olympic champion sprinter Tori Bowie from complications related to childbirth, a national conversation has been sparked once again over America’s Black maternal mortality rate, the Black community’s mistrust of the medical field and the disproportionate effect on Black women.

In Chicago, where recent hospital closings have rendered entire swathes of the city “birth deserts,” the issue is laid plain: Black maternal health-care conditions remain dismal despite years of criticism, Black health-care officials say.

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