Black Maternal Health Week: PRH in Action
Happy Black Maternal Health Week! We are celebrating the 10th year of Black Mama’s Matter Alliance hosting a week committed to the strength and resilience of Black-led perinatal, maternal, and reproductive health organizations.
We join all organizations and individuals in naming the reproductive injustices that Black birthing people face every day and believe in a liberated future of restoration, justice, and joy. We at PRH are guided by this shared belief that it is through the joy of our communities that we can build person-centered solutions to the preventable inequities we see in access to sexual and reproductive health care.
This Black Maternal Health Week, PRH staff and Fellows were attending the National Abortion Federation’s Annual Meeting, and our commitment to maternal health outcomes, the decriminalization of pregnant people, and equitable access to sexual and reproductive health care was front and center. In three panels, “Rethinking Mandated Reporting,” “Policing Pregnancy: The Impact of ‘Test and Report’ on Pregnant Patients Amidst the Rise of Fetal Personhood,” and “Beyond the Barriers: Opportunities and Challenges to Address the Nexus in Abortion Criminalization and Black Maternal Health Crisis,” PRH team members Dr. Jamila Perritt, Adrienne Ramcharan, Mani Vinson, and Taryn Graves, alongside our amazing Leadership Training Academy Fellows, shared information and guided conversations to ensure that members of the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements remain clear in their commitment to health, safe, and thriving Black community members.
We spoke with the panelists to bring their take-home messages to all of you, as we join in celebration of BMHW 2026’s theme: Rooted in Justice & Joy.
Why did you submit a panel on this subject matter?
Pregnancy criminalization and the role of health care providers in the hospital to criminalization pipeline is primarily discussed in regards to the criminal legal system, but even more families end up involved with the family policy system because of health care providers. This has profound and long-lasting impacts on the family and children separated due to reports from health care providers.
This can be stopped. And we at PRH are in community with the providers who can make real change. The family policing system disproportionately affects Black birthing people. It is imperative that physicians acknowledge and correct the impacts they have when charting under the guise of mandating reporting.
We are committed to unpacking the deep history of medicalized racism and the ways in which that history influences health outcomes and criminalization for Black birthing people. We were committed to engaging in these conversations at the NAF conference this year because deeper than us discussing the inequities that exist in Black maternal health, we wanted to unpack the difference between abortion criminalization (laws that have been used to criminalize abortion, pregnancy loss, and self-managed abortion) and health care criminalization (like mandatory reporting and the involvement of family policing).
What do you hope attendees walk away with?
A sense of responsibility to protect patients and not the systems that perpetuate harm.
What is one thing you hope attendees will change their mind about?
- I hope attendees will change their minds about being facilitators of harm on the patients they have sworn an oath to heal.
- I hope clinicians will start to consider what patient criminalization looks like beyond the traditional criminal legal system.
What is one thing you hope attendees will do differently after attending your session?
- I hope some of the strategies around charting from a harm reduction perspective are implemented.
- I hope attendees will begin to interrogate and question whether all normalized and routine aspects of care in fact hold a clinical significance for providing the care their patient has requested.
We remain committed to the vision and priorities celebrated on Black Maternal Health Week every week. It is only through centering the realities of Black birthing people that we can ground our behaviors in ways that reduce harm and build news ways toward health, safety, and liberation, together.
We want to know how you’re celebrating Black Maternal Health Week! Join in the fun by using the hashtag #BMHW26 on your content!
In commitment to our shared justice and joy!
The PRH team
The post Black Maternal Health Week: PRH in Action appeared first on Physicians for Reproductive Health.