HMC Ethics Forum | Part 1 - Positive Birth Outcomes & Harmful Birth Experiences

Positive Birth Outcomes & Harmful Birth Experiences

This session explores the contrast between institutional definitions of safety and the lived experiences of safety as defined for, by, and with Black mothers. Participants will examine how systemic structures define “being safe” and how these definitions may not align with patient experiences of “feeling safe”. The session emphasizes the importance of community wisdom in shaping perceptions of quality and safety.

Objectives:
1. Evaluate Black birth outcomes using health equity definitions and Black mother’s lived experience.
2. Define the limitations in the existing obstetric quality and patient safety paradigm
3. Explain the difference between “being safe" vs. "feeling safe".
4. Analyze a Black birth narrative within the context of emotional safety and emotional harm.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), proudly stands as the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with nearly 30 years of supporting women, girls, and gender expansive people across the sexual, reproductive and perinatal life course. Her work interrogates and transforms quality and patient safety paradigms through application of participatory multilevel quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods and methodologies that simultaneously operationalize Black feminism, reproductive justice, and research justice, at the intersection of cultural humility and scientific rigor, also known as cultural rigor. As an improvement and implementation scientist activist, boarded certified "dissident and recovering" OBGYN, and applied epidemiologist grounded, she and her team developed the first and only validated Patient Reported Experience Measure of obstetric racism© (the PREM-OB Scale™ Suite), which is now available for implementation, spread, and scale as prevention and mitigation against obstetric racism. Dr. Scott is also the author of SACKRED Birth: Mobilizing A New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, a vital call for prioritizing Black mothers’ expectations, expressions, and experiences in clinical practice, decision making, and care delivery using new quality norms and methodologies to amplify the humanity and power, not pathology, of Black reproducing bodies and Black births.