Senator Bill Cassidy slammed for comments on Black maternal mortality

Cassidy was asked about Louisiana’s high maternal mortality rate and suggested that if you factor out Black women, the state is less of an outlier.

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has found himself in a firestorm in social and national media circles after being quoted as saying that the state’s high maternal mortality rate wouldn’t look as bad if you factored out the higher percentage of Black population in the state.

“About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Sen. Bill Cassidy said in an interview with POLITICO for the Harvard Chan School of Public Health series Public Health on the Brink. “Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”

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