the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 16, 2026
Janell Green Smith died January 1, 2026, of complications from her first pregnancy, the day after she had worked 12 hours as a certified nurse-midwife, delivering seven babies. She was 31 years old and beloved in her black community in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She was a mainstay at her job at Prisma Health Greenville Midwifery Care.
The president of The American College of Nurse Midwives, Jessica Brumley, pointed out on the PBS Newshour that black women die three times more frequently in pregnancy than white women in the U.S. As Brumley put it, black women are “more likely to [be forced to] seek care in systems of care that are not high quality…. The chronic stress, the generations of chronic stress, the different exposures to racism in this country, all of that adds and creates what is known as weathering, right? And so it makes it more difficult to manage these conditions in individuals who have had these exposures.”
We live with a healthcare system that is designed to create such outcomes, as Brumley said. “And when we think about historically where our system has come from, it came from centering childbirth into the hospital, away from the community, away from the people who cared for us, right, our community-based midwives, Black granny midwives, and that nurturing environment into an environment that wasn’t welcoming and still isn’t often very welcoming for Black women in our country.”
Brumley emphasized that when one part of the population receives poorer health care, it drags down the health care for the entire population. In the U.S. a person with more income has better health insurance, access to better hospitals, and better health outcomes. She concluded, “If we can design a system where Black women have the best outcomes, everyone else will have better outcome too, because even though Black women have some of the worst outcomes in the U.S., the U.S. has some of the worst maternal health outcomes in the world.”
Janell Smith dedicated her life to best serving those who, like her, were shut out of an advanced care system.