[The new documentary "Aftershock" tells the stories of two young
women who suffered preventable deaths, and of the activists working to
protect Black mothers.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘AFTERSHOCK’ EXAMINES THE FALLOUT OF THE BLACK MATERNAL MORTALITY
CRISIS  
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Gabrielle Bruney
July 19, 2022
Jezebel
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_ The new documentary "Aftershock" tells the stories of two young
women who suffered preventable deaths, and of the activists working to
protect Black mothers. _

Omari Maynard and Shamony Gibson, Photo: Onyx Collective

 

In October 2019, Shamony Makeba Gibson, a 30-year-old Black woman,
collapsed in her Brooklyn home two weeks after giving birth to her
second child. Though she’d experienced symptoms
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a blood clot, the question that medical professionals asked again and
again as they treated her was whether or not she was on drugs.

“Next set of people come in, ‘Is she on drugs? Does she use
drugs,’” Shamony’s mother, Shawnee Benton-Gibson, says in
the documentary
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“‘I just told your colleagues, I’m telling you.’ Then another
round of people come in—‘Is she on drugs?’”

Gibson—who was not, as her family insisted again and again to
healthcare providers, a drug user—died of a pulmonary embolism, the
condition her mother suspected she was suffering from all along.

_Aftershock_, which premiered on Hulu
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examines the Black maternal mortality crisis through the tragic and
preventable deaths of Gibson and another woman, Amber Rose Isaac
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The film, directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee, follows their
survivors as they struggle with the loss of their partners, sisters,
and daughters—the aftershocks that give the film its title—and
funnel their grief into activism.

“Both of these families were very much interested in having a
conversation about what was happening,” Lee said in a Zoom interview
with Jezebel. “And so we all came together as collaborators, wanting
to have this conversation and raise awareness beyond the communities
that already knew about what was happening around Black maternal
health.”

The U.S. maternal mortality rate is more than twice
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of peer nations like Canada and the U.K., but the dangers childbirth
poses to Black American women are particularly stark
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Nationwide, Black women
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three times more likely than white women to suffer childbirth-related
deaths, and the gulf is even wider in New York City, where Black women
are 12 times
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likely to die than their white counterparts.

Eiselt, the director of the 2018 documentary
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Hasidic women in Brooklyn to establish a women’s EMT corp, partnered
with Lee, who’s served as a producer on projects like the film
adaptation of Walter Dean Myers’ _Monster_ and the TV
series _She’s Gotta Have It_, which was created by her husband,
Spike Lee. They were initially inspired to create _Aftershock_ after
the publication of a ProPublica investigation
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the Black maternal health emergency into the national spotlight.

“A few weeks after we met, that’s when Shawnee Benton-Gibson put
out a call that she was creating this event called ‘Aftershock’ to
commemorate Shamony, who had just passed two months prior,” said
Eiselt. “So I saw that and immediately called Tanya and was like,
‘I think this is something we should explore and get into.’”

Just months later, Isaac, a 26-year-old Black woman from the
Bronx, delivered
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first child via an emergency c-section. Days earlier, she’d tweeted,
“Can’t wait to write a tell-all about my experience during my last
two trimesters dealing with incompetent doctors at Montefiore.”
Instead, she died without ever meeting her son, Elias.

In the wake of her death, Isaac’s partner Bruce McIntyre III
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Shamony’s partner Omari Maynard, became a Black maternal health
activist, and _Aftershock_ documents the families as they hold press
conferences, give speeches, and testify before political bodies.

“[Maynard and McIntyre], those two were just in Washington,
D.C., speaking on maternal mental health,” said Eiselt.
“They’re not stopping.”

The film also travels to Oklahoma, one of the states with the highest
maternal death rates. There, the filmmakers followed a Black woman as
she navigated pregnancy and childbirth and visited a Tulsa hospital
that served a high proportion of women of color and was struggling
with poor maternal health outcomes. Though the staff of the labor and
delivery unit was working with Harvard Medical School OB-GYN Dr. Neel
Shah to address these failures of care, Eiselt said that some of the
Oklahoma practitioners the filmmakers spoke to “bristle[d]” at
the mention of the history of anti-Black racism in Tulsa
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“It’s hard to say what those providers think,” said Eiselt. In
preliminary Zoom conversations, some doctors reacted to discussion of
the national maternal mortality problem as if it were “offensive to
even recognize it.”

“Because to them, they’re these O.B.s, saving women,” said
Eiselt, “and so they were defensive in that way.”

Another barrier to ending the maternal mortality crisis is the fall
of _Roe v. Wade_. Maternal mortality rates nationwide are expected
to rise
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the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to nullify the right
to an abortion, and the Black maternal mortality rate is expected to
increase more than that of white women.

“We’ve already seen so much confusion about how we care for
women that we’re absolutely going to see these deaths go up,”
said Lee. “Women are going to continue to be more and more
dismissed.”

“Forced birth in a country where Black women are dying at three
times the rate of white women is the most anti-life thing you can
do,” Eiselt added. “But we already know that preserving life is
not the goal of this.”

Still, there are also causes for optimism, as activists like Isaac’s
and Gibson’s survivors help lead the charge for increased access to
doula and midwifery care, and a new generation
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healthcare workers confront centuries of bias within American
medicine. Even some healthcare providers who are reluctant to contend
with the deadly effects of racism may no longer be able to fully
ignore the problem.

“I think that the good news is they know it’s a problem,” said
Lee. “They also know they’re getting to the place where they
can’t really just blame Black women for the issue. There is an
understanding that there’s a systemic issue that’s at hand
here.”

* Black Mothers
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* black maternal mortality
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* Structural Racism
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* Institutionalized Racism
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* aftershock
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