Lucinda Canty ’94MSN
A few statistics: Black women are, on average, twice as likely as white women to experience life-threatening complications during pregnancy. They are three times more likely to die from pregnancy. These disparities hold, regardless of income level or educational attainment.
One simple way to reduce the disparity, says Lucinda Canty, is just to “give patients space to be seen and heard.” She is associate professor of nursing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and founder of Lucinda’s House, a nonprofit devoted to supporting Black women through their pregnancy.
To illustrate, she told a story that was told to her. A Black woman she met had an obstetrician who asked at every appointment: “Do you have any questions?” The patient did, but they were vague, not formulated, and so the OB would sit for a few minutes as the patient gathered her thoughts. And then, as he got up to leave, he would ask what the patient needed from him right then—and, again, he would pause, as the background needs that she felt but had not yet articulated took shape into something she could voice.
“Asking those two questions and being present changed her whole view,” Canty says. “She felt safe in the care he provided.”
Lucinda’s House offers this same space to women who are pregnant, considering pregnancy, or postpartum; it runs workshops in hospitals and clinics to help the doctors and nurses and administrators understand how listening contributes to better outcomes, racism to worse outcomes; it organizes local showers for pregnant women to reestablish a community of joy around the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Lucinda’s House is a center that empowers the women and the families it serves, Canty says. “People say they are grateful that I’ve been available to them. They say they don’t know if they would’ve made it without that.”
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