What to Know
You can’t always be sure when you go into labor, or when you are even in active labor, especially if you’re a first-time mom. If you’ve been through this rodeo more than once, however, you might know a thing or two about the telltale signs of a baby being ready to push its way through the birth canal, like, right now.
That’s what happened for one Black woman, whose video in labor with a laissez-faire intake nurse has gone viral for several reasons.
In the video, the woman writhes in pain in a wheelchair while she attempts to answer the nurse’s questions.
Meanwhile, the nurse has zero sense of urgency in asking her list of questions. Now, people are accusing the intake nurse, a white woman, of racism in her attitude toward the pregnant woman.
If you’ve ever been in active labor and tried to answer questions from your partner, let alone a bored-looking nurse, then you understand the overwhelming urge to strangle literally anyone within an arm’s reach.
So before we start talking about sides, let’s be clear that there really is only one side to take here.
@kashman2814 deathly charge nurse! donot care bout black women and babies uncaring paperwork over life this baby had to have severe test in the 24h of birth do to her actions
♬ original sound – Suggababies❌
The woman is clearly in active labor in the video.
Although the nurse asks a few questions initially, most of which could probably wait until after the patient is comfortable in a delivery room, eventually she stops asking questions altogether.
Maybe she wants to save face because she realizes she is being filmed. But let’s be real here, because the damage is done, complete with the name and location of the hospital written across the screen in the TikTok.
As the woman screams out in pain, the sound is jarring.
But if you have ever been anywhere near a delivery room in a hospital, the guttural cries of a woman giving birth and screaming through the agony is exactly what the woman sounds like in the TikTok.
And, because of the intake nurse’s behavior and attitude toward her, people are, to say the least, pretty peeved.
“All pregnant women are supposed to go straight to Labor and Delivery, not the waiting area,” someone commented on the video.
According to many, the ordeal speaks to a larger problem of the way some Black women are treated by white women in settings like this.
“This. This is why Black mothers and infants are twice as likely to die during childbirth,” someone commented. “This is unacceptable.”
Another user advised her to sue the hospital and “get paid” for her ordeal. “They made her wait in triage rather than sending her right up to labor and delivery?” They wrote.
Other users who are in the medical field or have had experiences giving birth at busy hospitals chimed in to share their own thoughts.
Spoiler alert, no one understands why this happened to the woman in labor, and everyone wants to know what the nurse in the video was thinking.
“She did that on purpose,” someone wrote in the comments, of the white intake nurse. “I’ve never seen a mom in active labor not be rushed into the delivery suites.”
Another user wrote, “This happens way too often to Black women in this America.”
After the user who shared the video, who is also the mother of the mom in labor, posted a follow-up video to share more details about what happened. She says in the video that the hospital was informed of their arrival ahead of time, but still weren’t properly prepared for them.
“I ran in, I said, ‘hey, my daughter’s in the car, I went to emergency, and they told me I had to come to the front,” she explains.
She then says that the nurse she spoke to refused to go out to her car to help her bring her daughter inside. Instead, the TikTok creator had to get a wheelchair and, with the help of a police officer in the lobby, bring it out to her daughter, who was in labor in her car.
