“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,” Cassidy told Politico.
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) blasted Cassidy in a thread posted to Twitter.
“Due to structural inequities built into our health care system. Black mothers are 3 times as likely to die due to complications from pregnancy than white mothers. In Louisiana, that number jumps to 4,” she coninued.
“GOP elected officials like Sen. Cassidy have no desire to dismantle these inequities — it’s easier for them to ignore them. Because dismantling health inequities means acknowledging systemic racism, and it’s against his best interests to do that,” she wrote. “It’s no surprise that a member of the party that scores political points by spewing conspiratorial ‘great replacement’ rhetoric and fomenting moral panics about so-called critical race theory in schools is perfectly comfortable ignoring the plight of Black American mothers.”