I agree TFA seemed to do this throughout, and it made me question the narrative significantly more than I might have otherwise. For example, why are Black wome

I agree TFA seemed to do this throughout, and it made me question the narrative significantly more than I might have otherwise. For example, why are Black women experiencing pregnancy-related mortality 4x higher than Hispanic? Lu believes that pregnant black women face the stress of a lifetime of exposure to racism, exacerbated by the experience of nine months of pregnancy. Research backs him up. Institutional racism has been linked to high-blood pressure; black women’s bodies pay the consequences of “unique stressors around racism, sexism, violence of any kind, or economic burden,” says Fleda Mask Jackson, a professor of public health who led a 2001 study on why African-American women, regardless of their socio-economic background, are more likely to have premature babies. She found that the mother’s internalized stress is likely to lead to poor birth outcomes for the baby, and believes it’s not unreasonable to infer that those stressors have consequences for the mothers too. This is entirely uncompelling.