What to Know
There is a lot about giving birth that is scary for women from a medical standpoint. But according to a Black woman on TikTok, Danielle, there are dangers that white women aren’t even aware of. It’s all about, Danielle explains in her video, “systematic racism” that might sound surprising to those who have never witnessed it or experienced it after giving birth.
Danielle clarifies that she isn’t directly referring to being called the N-word or being discriminated against in more obvious ways. Instead, she explains, she experienced something directly after she gave birth where she was in a vulnerable state and expected to accept the racism from a gaggle of white nurses. She refused to just accept it, and now, she’s sharing that story with others.
@itsdanielle2u Black women giving birth in a hospital is more often than life-threatening and dangerous
♬ original sound – Danielle To You
There are dangers people don’t know about for Black women after birth.
Danielle doesn’t go into detail about the physical dangers of giving birth for Black women. It’s more about the microaggressions and racism that she has seen and experienced as a Black woman and as a Black mother. She says that one instance was when she gave birth to her daughter at a hospital and had a C-section. Almost immediately afterwards, she was told that her breastmilk was unsuitable for her baby and that the nurses had to give her baby formula.
Since Danielle had planned to breastfeed, she fought against this. When the nurses told her that her breast milk tested positive for drugs, Danielle demanded that it be retested. In fact, she had to press the hospital staff further until they finally gave in and retested the breast milk. In the end, they learned, her milk was totally fine. According to Danielle, it was all done in an effort to test formula on her child, a Black child.
“This is where the systematic racism comes into play,” she says in her TikTok.
“Not being called the N-word, but literal systematic racism. They come in and tell me, ‘we cannot give your daughter your breastmilk because we found drugs in your system.’ I say, ‘well, that’s impossible because I don’t do drugs’. They say, ‘it was marijuana.’ I say, ‘that is also impossible because I don’t smoke marijuana.’ They say, ‘well, we found it in your milk and we cannot give her your milk. We’re going to give her this formula. We need you to sign a paper for this formula we’re going to give her.'”
Danielle further explains in her video that the nurses told her, “Maybe your neighbors made some brownies and it had weed in it and you didn’t know.”
This not only insinuated that Danielle lived in a place where neighbors would give drugs to her unwittingly, but that she might not live in a community in a home she owned.
She says, “I’m post-surgery and I have to advocate for my child, my Black daughter, to drink her Black mother’s breast milk because I’m being gaslit this whole time, and here’s the kicker. What actually happened is they wanted to test a formula out on my daughter. And if you don’t know this, trials and tests and studies are done a lot on Black babies, because, unknowingly, they think that Black people are uneducated.”
