The federal legislative package built to address why Black women die in childbirth at far higher rates than other women is, increasingly, not allowed to say so. According to Capital B News, the word "Black" has been all but scrubbed from the Momnibus Act — the bill once formally titled the "Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act."
What changed
The 2020 version of the legislation referenced Black women more than a dozen times. By the 2023 version, "Black" appeared exactly once in the entire package, and the word had been dropped from the title. The shift tracks the broader federal retreat from DEI language: the current administration has moved to eliminate the Office of Minority Health and pressured institutions to strip racial descriptors from funding applications. A bill is being edited to survive a political climate, not to match a medical reality.
Why the word is not cosmetic
The numbers are the entire reason the bill exists. The overall US maternal mortality rate is 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births. For Black women it is 50.3 — nearly three times the rate for white women, a gap that holds regardless of income or education. That last clause is the load-bearing one: this is not a poverty story that race happens to track. A wealthy, college-educated Black woman still faces sharply elevated risk, which means the disparity is specifically racial — and a race-neutral bill is, by construction, aimed away from its own evidence.
The advocates make the point plainly. "There is a painful irony in a bill no longer naming the population it was created to serve," said Angela Aina of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. Rep. Summer Lee reduced the operational problem to one question: "How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say 'Black'?" Removing the word does not lower the 50.3. It removes the policy's ability to aim at it.
The read
This is what language rollback looks like when it reaches a statute. A hashtag or a grant application can be reworded at little practical cost; a public-health bill cannot, because the bill's job is to direct money and attention at a measured problem. Strip the specificity and what remains is a maternal-health bill that funds programs for everyone equally — while the deaths stay distributed very unequally. It is the same tension visible wherever policy and capital try to close racial gaps without naming them — the gap that funds like Symphonic Capital were built to address. A problem you are not allowed to name is a problem you are not really equipped to fix.
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