Roads Are Racist, So Is Pregnancy

Since the illegitimate Biden Administration came to power it has tried to make everything about race. Every outrage, sleight or disparity, real or imagined, is laid at the door of white supremacy or some sort of hidden conspiracy by whites in general. Sadly, this idiocy isn’t confined to the United States; while Pete Buttigieg complains about “racist roads”, on the other side of The Pond, the deaths of black women during difficult pregnancies is being blamed on the same chimera. A report about these so-called disparities was published in November last year, but it was back in the news this week with the BBC peddling the same racial narrative.

To take the Buttigieg claim first, in June last year he launched a billion dollar scheme to combat this imaginary problem. Actually, there are real problems here, but they are not in any sense racial. City dwellers of all races need and deserve good local public transport. Because of its size, Americans who live further out rely more on private transport, but there is no reason they should not be better served by public transport as well. Good public transport requires substantial investment, but for decades America has been throwing money at problems abroad, often problems America has created or contributed to. Bombing a country then rebuilding its infrastructure may be profitable for certain American corporations – which will not be named here though you probably know who they are – but every dollar spent abroad is a dollar the home market misses out on.

With regard to the pregnancy issue and the “disproportionately high number” of black fatalities during pregnancy in comparison with white ones, Simon Webb has made an excellent video about this for his History Debunked YouTube channel, but we can only reiterate here what Thomas Sowell and the late Walter Williams were saying before most of the people reading this article were born.

If you take any two groups of people by any criteria – race. sex, religion, political affiliation, height, place of birth, place of residence, diet…there will be disparities, and sometimes these disparities are huge. For example, in 2020, life expectancy in Japan was 84.62 years while in Brazil it was 74.01 years, a significant difference. Women live longer than men the world over, so on these facts alone it isn’t too surprising that there are significant differences in deaths between black women and white women during a particularly difficult period. In this connection it would be well to consider the historical aspect. 

In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Britain was overwhelmingly white – whatever the BBC would have you believe. Between 1700 and 1750, there were 10.5 maternal deaths per thousand (based on a fair sized sample). Between 1800 and 1850, this dropped to 5 per thousand. Between 2016 and 2018 it was 9.6 per hundred thousand, a staggering decrease, but as The Guardian points out, still far too high when compared with Norway, for example. The reasons for such improvements are not far to seek: advances in medicine, public health, technology, nutrition…Medical professionals need to concentrate on the real issues relating to expectant mothers and not be taken in by this idiocy of the ubiquitous race lobby.