The Black Woman Stress Crisis : Black Maternal Health Week
- Chardá Bell, IBCLC, CBE, CD
- Apr 11
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
This isn’t my usual kind of post for this blog, but stress absolutely impacts milk supply, so I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch for this audience. Plus it's Black Maternal Health Week, so let’s get into it.
I live with chronic stress. I’ve been diagnosed with medical anxiety on top of general anxiety and race-based PTSD. I see a therapist when I can, when I need to, when I’m not too overwhelmed to even ask for help. I’ve been dancing with borderline hypertension for the last 15 years. And over the last two years alone, I’ve endured seven miscarriages, my most recent loss was twins.
Stress isn’t a buzzword for me, it’s a lived, embodied experience. It shows up in my blood pressure, in my sleep, in my womb, in my breath. I’ve faced more stress than I’ve ever wanted or asked for: from serving as an elected official and getting daily death threats from white supremacists, to enduring microaggressions and workplace discrimination at a nonprofit job, to suddenly becoming the caretaker for a young, once-healthy parent who was placed into a skilled nursing facility after her own Black woman stress crisis. That last part, that generational cycle is actually what pushed me to write this post.
See, my childhood was pretty amazing. I don’t have any big traumatic memories. My parents divorced when I was 17, but before that, I had a relatively comfortable dare I say plush upbringing. Things didn’t start unraveling until I was 19 and on my own. That’s when I was introduced to the hard truth of what it really means to be a Black woman moving through the world. Not just in America, because racism isn’t exclusive to this country, but here, it has its own special flavor.
Malcolm X wasn’t lying in 1964 when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
And I’ve felt that disrespect, that neglect, that lack of protection on a cellular level.
On my 38th birthday, I found out I was pregnant with twins. I was overjoyed but also terrified. Not because I didn’t want two babies, but because I was scared I would lose them. My body did what it always does under pressure, it tensed up. I tried to will them into existence with every breath I took, every muscle clenched, every sleepless night. It was my seventh pregnancy (ninth if you count my living children), and my body gave it everything it had. But eventually, I lost them, both, over the course of a few weeks. It crushed me. But instead of shutting down, I got mad. Furious.
Why the hell was this happening? All my labs were normal. I was doing everything “right.” There had to be a reason. So I started dissecting everything, my health, my environment, my daily stressors, my grief, my generational trauma. And while I might not have landed on the answer, I did land on an answer: stress is killing us. It’s not just anecdotal. It’s contributing to miscarriages, preterm labor, high blood pressure, heart disease, low milk supply, and the devastating Black maternal mortality and morbidity rates we see today—for birthing people and for our babies.
Stress is baked into my DNA. I come from a line of Black women with hypertension: my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother who died just two years after giving birth to my granny. I carry their stories in my blood, and their trauma lives in my tissues.
And it’s not just theoretical. In 1959, my great-grandmother (my mom’s paternal grandmother) died during childbirth because of medical racism. She gave birth at home because she wasn’t allowed in the local hospital in Arkansas. The doctor came to the house, delivered the first twin, then left before the second baby came. Just left. My great-grandfather chased him down, begged him to come back. He didn’t. She died. That death was 1000% preventable. And yet here we are, decades later, still losing Black mothers and babies in hospitals that ignore our pain and silence our voices.
That’s why I’ve started calling this what it is: The Black Woman Stress Crisis.
Because if we’re going to talk about the Black maternal health crisis, we have to talk about what’s feeding it. We have to talk about how our bodies are worn down by stressors we don’t choose stressors we inherit, stressors we internalize, stressors designed by systems meant to break us.
Not long ago, a Black woman professor took her own life. I didn’t even need to read the details. My spirit knew, America killed her. The pressure, the isolation, the grind, the fight to prove yourself and still never be enough it adds up. It always adds up.
I also recently read about the “glass cliff” a phenomenon where Black women are put into leadership roles during crises, handed the sinking ship and told to steer it back to shore without support. I’m living that reality right now. I stepped into an organization that was in disarray. It needs more than just leadership, it needs repair, rest, resources, and revival. And it’s taking a toll on my health. Had I known what I was walking into, I might have walked away.
But I didn’t. And now here I am, naming it.
We are living in a Black Woman Stress Crisis. And if we don’t name it, we can’t fight it. We can’t heal what we won’t acknowledge.
And no, I don’t have a neat ending or a clean resolution. I’m still in it. But I know I’m not alone.
This is the part where people usually say, “Just take care of yourself,” “Try yoga,” or “Make sure you’re resting.” And while I appreciate the sentiment, those things don’t remove the systemic pressure cooker that is life for Black women. I can take all the deep breaths I want, but they don’t erase the fact that I walk into rooms where I’m either invisible or hyper-visible in the most dangerous ways. It doesn’t eliminate the grief that lives in my bones or the inherited trauma passed down through my bloodline. It doesn’t bring my babies back.
But naming it helps.
Naming this as a Black woman stress crisis helps me feel a little less gaslit, a little less isolated, and a little more seen. It creates language around the exhaustion we all carry, and how it doesn’t just impact our minds, but our bodies, our pregnancies, our blood pressure, our milk supply, our hearts. It’s real, it’s measurable, and it’s deadly. And if we’re not including that in conversations about Black maternal health, breastfeeding, and wellness, then we’re missing the whole damn point.
So this is me, breaking my own writing norm to talk about stress. Because stress is the norm for too many of us. And while I don’t have all the answers, I do know this: we deserve ease. We deserve softness. We deserve care without having to fight for it. And if nobody else is going to say it out loud, I will, this country owes Black women so much more than it’s ever given.
If you’re reading this and you’re tired too, if you’re carrying more than your fair share, if you’re feeling broken or burnt out or bitter or numb. I see you. And I’m holding space for your rage, your grief, your hope, and your healing.
We’re not built to carry all of this. But we’ve been carrying it anyway. And I’m starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to anymore. Not alone.
Learn More:
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/black-women-excluded-from-critical-studies-due-to-weathering/
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