Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) reintroduced her 2018 bill that seeks to address rising maternal mortality rates, particularly among black women. Harris’s Maternal CARE Act, and the accompanying House version, would authorize $150 million toward programs that seek to help medical professionals identify high-risk pregnancies and establish implicit-bias training curriculum for medical schools.

Her bill seeks to address a deeply troubling development: Severe maternal complications have more than doubled in the past 20 years and the U.S. maternal mortality rate has become the highest among high-income countries. Estimates of the maternal mortality rate span from 17.2 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to 30.1 women per 100,000 births from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Read Arielle Kane’s full opinion piece by clicking here.