by James A. Bacon

Radio IQ, Virginia’s public radio network, is aptly named. It appeals to highly educated people who think of themselves as smarter and better informed than everybody else. Radio IQ listeners may, in fact, have higher IQs than ordinary Virginians — the correlation between education and intelligence is real.

Whether public radio listeners are better informed, however, is dubious, especially if they rely upon articles like today’s piece previewing the legislative battle over what to do about racial disparities in maternal health outcomes. Radio IQ kicked off its article with this lede:

With mere hours until Governor Glenn Youngkin announces his budget amendments for the 2025 session, he doubled down on his disinterest in racial bias training for Virginia doctors despite his admission that such biases exist.

Upon what basis does Radio IQ Richmond Bureau Chief Brad Kutner assert that Youngkin concedes that racial “biases” exist? He tells us in the follow-up paragraph.

“We know there’s a disparate outcome between Black women and white women,” Youngkin said Tuesday morning at a press event to support his new maternal health initiatives ahead of the 2025 session.

Kutner, whose job as a journalist is to clarify the issues, has done a blockbuster job of obscuring them. He confuses acceptance of a fact that nobody disputes — that Black mothers disproportionately suffer adverse medical outcomes during pregnancy and up to a year after — with skepticism toward assertions made by General Assembly Democrats pushing racial bias “training” that racial bias is a significant contributing factor to those adverse outcomes.

There is nothing inconsistent about Youngkin acknowledging the disparity in medical outcomes and declining to blame the disparity on the racial bias of doctors and nurses. Youngkin acknowledges many factors contribute to poor maternal health, and his policy proposals seek to identify interventions to address those factors directly.

Kutner’s confusion on the subject is exceeded only by that of Senator Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, whom he quotes uncritically:

“People are dying as a consequence, that’s the part [Youngkin’s] ignoring,” she said.

People are dying as the consequence of what, exactly? Is Locke saying that people are dying as a consequence of racial bias, conscious or unconscious, on the part of Virginia’s medical professionals? Is she saying that they are dying as a result of disparities in the “social determinants of health”? Or is she blaming Black deaths on “systemic racism” in the healthcare system?

That’s not clear from the rhetoric emanating from Democrats these days. The only unifying theme in their jumbled assertions is that White people are to blame somehow for the higher mortality rate of Black mothers.

Now, it so happens that we have hard data on the factors behind the disparity in racial health outcomes: the Virginia Maternal Mortality Review Team’s 2023 Annual Report. The report was submitted to the General Assembly in February, so there’s no excuse for Locke not knowing what’s in it.

In 2023 there were 62 pregnancy-related deaths in Virginia (down from 2022 but up from 35 in 2018). Of those deaths, 37 in 2021 were White women, 23 were Black women, and four were of “other” races. While the absolute numbers were small compared to other causes of death — 84,000 Virginians died that year — Black women were a bit more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or the one-year period after the end of pregnancy.

If Black women expired at the same “rate” as White women, they would have experienced 10 or 11 fewer deaths last year.

The Mortality Review Team does not adjust mortality rates for the existence of pre-existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, which might eliminate the racial disparities altogether. But it does dig into the circumstances of each death to ascertain the role of a wide range of factors.

Their summary of contributing factors (multiple factors can contribute to a death):

• Facility-related factors: “Inadequately trained personnel” (15.4% of cases) and “services unavailable” (15.4%).
• Community-related factors: “neighborhood or community environment” (22.9% of cases) and “services unavailable (20%).
• Provider-related factors: “failure to screen for risk (15.9% of cases),” “inadequate assessment of risk” (12.7%), and “delay in or lack of diagnosis, treatment or follow-up” (11.1%).
• Patient-related factors: “delay or failure to seek care – medical services” (12.2% of cases), “chronic medical conditions” (7.8%), “noncompliance” (7.2%), and “mental illness” (6.7%).

Of the 62 deaths in 2021, five were attributed to homicides, three to suicides, and 14 to “accidents” (mainly overdoses). Yes, homicides and drug overdoses are counted as pregnancy-related deaths.

The team distinguished between “preventable” deaths, which could have been averted by one or more reasonable changes in the aforementioned factors, and “unpreventable” deaths.

Ninety percent of cases among White women were found to be preventable as compared to 70% of cases among Black women and 80% among women of other races.

That’s a conclusion that you will never, ever hear from Radio IQ or Mamie Locke.

If the ratios had been reversed — if a greater percentage of maternal deaths were “preventable” for Black women than White women — the usual suspects would cite the figure as proof of bias and/or systemic racism. But the conclusion contradicted the Oppression Narrative so it went unnoted. Not a single Virginia news outlet reported the finding. (An op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch did cherry-pick data that highlighted the racial disparities but ignored everything else in the report).

If you are a Radio IQ listener, you’ll be exposed to stories you’d never hear otherwise — like BBC reports on the latest coup d’etat in the Global South or interviews with obscure authors on interesting-but-arcane topics. But don’t ever think you’re getting the whole story on any subject touching upon public broadcasting’s favored narratives.