Chelsea Clinton speaks about fight for reproductive rights

On the second day of 2023 Aspen Ideas: Health, Chelsea Clinton and Chanel Porchia-Albert honed in on women’s reproductive health and the fight to expand access to health services so women can make their own choices.

In 2021, 1,200 American women died from complications related to pregnancy, according to data that Clinton cited. She also said that women today are 50% more likely to die in childbirth than when she was born in 1980, and three times more likely to die in this country than in the year 2000.

“This is an area where we have made meaningful progress for women and families in our country for 20 years and then we got a slow and steady erosion of that progress, despite at least 80% of maternal deaths being judged to be preventable,” said Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “And we know what works, and we’re not doing what works.”

Clinton and Porchia-Albert, a reproductive justice advocate and executive director of Ancient Song Doula Services, also spoke about the challenges that women of color face across the country. It starts with a lack of access to services and education, but it goes beyond that into the delivery room and up until the child is growing into a young adult in a world that views them as a community threat because of the color of their skin.

“The United States is supposed to be the greatest nation,” Porchia-Albert said. “We’re the most industrialized nation, but the ways in which we treat our women and birthing people is terrible. We don’t value women. We don’t value children. We don’t value parenthood and what it means to be a parent.”

In addition to medical complications that can be dangerous to pregnant women, Clinton spoke about other causes of maternal death that could be prevented. In Colorado, she said the leading causes of maternal mortality are suicide and homicide involving a firearm, which she said is a “uniquely American collision of challenges of our underappreciation, de-centering of women with, I would argue, our overappreciation and centering of firearms.”

Accidental drug overdoses also are a leading cause of maternal mortality in Colorado and nationwide, Clinton said. Throughout the plenary session, Clinton and Porchia-Albert spoke about the work of birth doulas to provide services and care for pregnant mothers and newborns. Clinton said that the nation cannot rely solely on midwives and doulas to fix the mortality problem.

“We need policymakers to be doing more, not just on Medicaid reimbursement, but more holistically,” Clinton said. “When we know how to save women’s lives and when we know how to invest in at least beginning to ameliorate the harms of centuries of racism and gender discrimination in this country and the over-expectation of what we expect out of black women in this country, we know what to do, but unfortunately, in Arkansas, we are not doing that.”

Clinton was asked why she thought the maternal mortality crisis was happening and what she thought the key contributors were. It’s no mystery, she said.

“This is a failure of political will,” she said. “This is a comfort with the persistence of insidious racism and misogyny in this country. This is not a mystery.”

Porchia-Albert agreed that more needs to be done and said the health care and medical education systems need to be restructured to provide more care and, as she put it, “center” around women in general and women of color. She spoke about doctors and medical residents she works with in hospitals in New York and New Jersey, as well as other hospital staff who may come into contact with a pregnant mother, who don’t know how to speak to or treat a person going through a childbirth or a complication related to pregnancy.

That led to a discussion about the fast-approaching one-year anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which will be Saturday. Clinton had a few simple words to describe her reaction to the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that protected women’s rights to abortion: “I’m really f–king angry.”

That anger comes from knowing that women have died due to medical complications that could have been prevented, and that has been ignored, she said.

“That isn’t up for debate,” she said. “We knowingly have moved forward — because we haven’t gone back. We’re in 2023 — we have moved forward to again a time in which we are making women more vulnerable because of a very extreme, narrowly-rendered view of Christian, white nationalism.”

When members of the audience were invited to ask questions, South Carolina State Sen. Penry Gustafson stood up and spoke about the work Republican women are doing in her state’s senate to protect reproductive health rights, which Clinton and Porchia-Albert applauded. Gustafson also acknowledged Clinton’s anger and asked how opposing sides of the political aisle can talk about their disagreements calmly instead of with anger.

Clinton and Porchia-Albert thanked Gustafson for her question and agreed that there should be a better way of communicating, but they also said that there is nothing wrong with anger, which drives change. Porchia-Albert said there’s another emotion that can go hand-in-hand with anger as long as they’re combined to create change.

“Be angry, be hopeful, but never be meek,” she said.

NBC Weekend Today co-anchor Kristen Welker moderated the discussion.

Megan Webber, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer