A New York doctor is in hot water for “gendering” expectant BIPOC while referring to expectant Whites as “birthing people”.
NYC Department of Health’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michelle Morse used the different terms for different races in a post to her official Twitter account.
“The urgency of this moment is clear,” Dr. Morse said in her March 23 post. “Mortality rates of birthing people are too high, and babies born to Black and Puerto Rican mothers in this city are three times more likely to die in their first year of life than babies born to non-Hispanic White birthing people.”
Morse became the Big Apple’s chief medical officer at the DOH in February 2021, according to a report in the “New York Post”. The report noted she is also the department’s deputy commissioner for the Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness, which focuses on ending racial inequities.
Her tweet was not the first time Morse has created controversy concerning race. Dr. Morse promulgated a “proactively antiracist agenda for medicine” in a 2021 article with Dr. Bram Wispelwey, a former colleague at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Drs. Morse and Wispelwey’s paper “The anti-racist agenda for medicine — and the backlash it’s received” was published by “Becker’s Hospital Review”.
They argued that racism has contributed to unequal health outcomes and that doctors must acknowledge that.
“Healthcare institutions should redress damage by providing restitution to the harmed population while also offering pathways for access to services and care that have historically been denied,” Morse and her colleague said. “Redress could take multiple forms, from cash transfers and discounted or free care to taxes on nonprofit hospitals that exclude patients of color and race-explicit protocol changes.”
The health department’s head doctor received criticism from many critics on social media after her Twitter post.
“White Mothers are called ‘birthing people’ and black and Puerto Rican Mothers are called Mothers?” asked writer Kimberly Morin. “Your license to practice medicine should be revoked,””
Another Twitter user urged people, “Do what I did and report the tweet for racism and hate speech. Just because someone has a blue checkmark next to their name doesn’t mean they can be openly racist on twitter.”
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