From the Birthing Chamber to the Ballot Box: A Choice Between Erasure and Equality

The mythology of America is one of unblemished progress and triumph—a narrative amplified with renewed force as the United States continues to celebrate its 250th year. But those of us whose existence has always been a death-defying freedom struggle, propose an alternate observance—one that requires us all to reckon with the reality we are living in and the injustices that have shaped the society we’ve inherited.

We challenge this destructive myth by calling for a re-examination of the continued struggle for true equity and freedom. This is imperative as the very tools of democracy’s survival are currently under siege and being dismantled by an Executive and Supreme Court willing to erode its foundations.

I came to advancing the work of civil rights through research, policy, and advocacy, and recommitted to it through personal loss. Like countless Black birthing mothers before and after, I lost my firstborn, and subsequently many parts of myself to a totally preventable disease: American racism.

The Toll of American Racism

My birthing experience was not isolated. It was part of a pattern reflected in data, reinforced by history, and sustained by systems that continue to fail Black families. This is the biological toll of 250 years of systemic exclusion: Black women, irrespective of education and socioeconomic levels, are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than all non-Black women, nationally, and four to six times more likely in California.

Like countless Black birthing mothers before and after, I lost my firstborn, and subsequently many parts of myself to a totally preventable disease: American racism.

A Black woman with a graduate degree is more likely to die in childbirth than a White woman without a high school diploma. In America’s wealthiest cities, like San Francisco, Black newborns are six times more likely to die in their first year of life than White infants. These statistics are not abstract, but visceral evidence of a “post-colonial predator” that continues to feed on Black lives, even in 2026.

The threat is not confined to the delivery room. The same “colorblind medicine” that tears apart mother and child is mirrored in the “colorblind justice” of our highest court. This year, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which invalidated Louisiana’s fair congressional map, marked the final chapter in the majority’s demolition of the Voting Rights Act. By gutting Section 2 and subverting the protective purpose of the 14th Amendment, the Court has effectively advanced strategies to silence the voices of Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native people and women of all backgrounds across the country just as we approach pivotal elections.

There is a direct line from the birthing chamber to the ballot box. When the Court makes it impossible to challenge exclusionary voting practices, they ensure that the legislators who represent us will not reflect our greatest asset: multiculturalism. Without descriptive and substantive representation, the policy corrections needed to abate health care discrimination—including technical protocols to reduce discretion, doula programs to maximize successful birth outcomes, and medical education training to target stereotype bias—remain perpetually out of reach.

Extinguishing voter protections dishonors the multitudes who sacrificed life and limb between Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act, when 10,000 African Americans were lynched mostly for attempting to exercise their franchise.

After two years of study, the historic California Reparations Task Force established that in every social determinant of health, wealth, and education, Black people remain at the bottom. This is not due to a “lack of gumption,” or any of the gaslighting narratives that are used to misdirect the analysis toward notions of individualized black pathology.  It is the reverberating structural impact of 250 years of chattel slavery—what the UN has righteously declared as “the gravest crime against humanity,” capped off by 100 years of Jim Crow segregation, and 60 years of post-Civil Rights apartheid.

We will not stop in our march, nor spare any resource, until the sun eventually rises on an America with free and fair elections and equitable health for all its people.

We are experiencing a terrible moment of Black erasure where the antagonists of multiracial democracy use gerrymandering, disinformation, and the demolition of civil rights law to disrupt the momentum of our freedom struggle.

How many more Black people must be sacrificed to effectuate the promise of inclusivity?

How many times will a small burst of civil rights advancement precipitate a century-long retrenchment?

The answer is proportional to our willingness to employ strategic measures that uproot America’s deeply embedded racial pathology.

The Antidote Is Equality

The remedy must include court expansion and term limits as a fail-safe against the partisan takeover of our moral north stars. We must recognize that health care discrimination and voter suppression are two heads of the same beast.

The Equal Justice Society stands with the patriots who remain committed to the principles of the Voting Rights Act and the fight for reproductive justice. We have been here before. We know that we have no choice but to gather together once more and advance onward as a multiracial multitude marching in lockstep. Although the Court has committed arson on the American dream and committed genocide against our futures, we press on.

In our 250th year since signing the Declaration of Independence, the moral universe compels us to choose. Will we celebrate a hollow history of white supremacy, or will we build a multiracial, inclusive democracy? Will we accept erasure or demand equality?

At the Equal Justice Society, we choose the latter. Our demand from structural power is truth and equality.  We will not stop in our march, nor spare any resource, until the sun eventually rises on an America with free and fair elections and equitable health for all its people.