Louisiana GOP Senator Bill Cassidy is one smart cookie, he knows that his state suffers third-world like rates of maternal deaths due to pregnancy because it tolerates third world like poverty, food insecurity, lack of access to healthcare and little wherewithal to travel to more enlightened climes to seek the care they desperately need but can’t find in their state to one third of its citizens.
If you just eliminate those folks, the numbers aren’t so bad at all…
Vanity Fair
“”In an interview with Politico, the following words came out of Cassidy’s mouth: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”“”
Vanity Fair columnist Bess Levin has exactly zero forks to give to Cassidy’s fractured reasoning, writing:
“There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the idea that Cassidy—who wants to defund Planned Parenthood is all, Yes, on its face, our maternal mortality rates are abysmal, but if you only count white women, they’re not that bad! Then there’s the phrase “for whatever reason.” In fact, there is one very big reason in particular— perhaps you can take a guess? “It’s no mystery why maternal mortality rates are so high among Black women,” Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health said in response. “They are high because of the devastating impacts of structural racism and individual bias.” As Politico notes, Black mothers are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white mothers in the U.S., which has the worst mortality rate among developed nations and where “17 mothers die for every 100,000 pregnancies in the country.” In Louisiana, Black mothers are four times as likely to die than white mothers.”
Imagine Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski saying ‘Alaska’s snowfall totals aren’t so bad, you can totally move your golf course to Fairbanks… if you discount November, December, February and March our numbers aren’t so much different than Florida’s.’
Or Colorado’s Michael Bennet touting his state’s wheat production as equal to that of Kansas…if you just subtract ‘July, August and September.’
But on a more somber note, the scary part of this is that Cassidy belongs to a political cult that would be just fine with eliminating one third of it’s citizens.
If it only could.
