West Virginia’s babies and new mothers are at concerningly high risk of dying during and around childbirth. One of the key state strategies for addressing these problems are the infant and maternal mortality review teams, government-mandated panels to identify why people are dying, which groups are most at risk and what can be done to prevent deaths in the future.
Under current law, the panel isn’t allowed to talk to family members of the deceased. But lawmakers are considering changing that: HB 4874, which is on second reading in the House tomorrow, would, among other things, allow the panels to talk with family members if the majority of the panel votes there is “a clear public health interest” to do so.
But experts and some lawmakers say the changes don’t go far enough: they want to remove the line mentioning families altogether, leaving it up to the panel whether they would do so or not.
“Hearing from the voices of those people who have lost family members offers additional information that would not be received otherwise,” said Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. She said the current bill “makes the family interview more of an afterthought than a centerpiece.”
In a meeting of the House Health and Human Resources Committee last week, Del. Anitra Hamilton, D-Monongalia, tried to amend the bill to eliminate any mention of talking to the family, opening the door for a review team to ask family members to talk when it sees fit.
“It helps to instill confidence in the community that as a state, we’re trying to investigate and make a difference,” Hamilton said at the committee meeting. “And that ‘we don’t know’ is not a viable answer.”
Ultimately, the committee voted Hamilton’s amendment down. Del. Heather Tully, a Republican from Nicholas County and the vice chair of the committee, said she worried that without a majority vote, review team members could overwhelm families after losing a loved one.
“You don’t want to unnecessarily retraumatize them by dragging it up every single time,” Tully said during the committee meeting.
Angy Nixon, state policy chair of the American College of Nurse-Midwives’s West Virginia affiliate, said she appreciates why people might worry about harming people who have just lost a relative. But in her decades of experience as a West Virginia midwife, creating a voluntary space for people in distress to talk about what happened can often help them heal.
Nixon also said that it’s an important way for West Virginians of color, who die in ways related to childbirth at higher rates than the state population as a whole, to share unfair experiences like a Black mother whose pain was ignored by a nurse or doctor.
“It allows people to feel heard,” Nixon said. “One of the reasons that we have some of the disparities is that a lot of people don’t feel heard.”
Hamilton said she plans to reintroduce her amendment again on Tuesday, when the bill will be up for amendments on the House floor.
She said she sees the proposed change as working toward her top priority: to help pass laws that protect marginalized West Virginians from dying so frequently.
“You can’t get the whys unless you have a conversation,” Hamilton said. “It puts us in a position to be proactive in the outcomes of our moms and babies.”