In the United States, Black birthing people face disproportionately high rates of pregnancy-related deaths, and these rates continue to increase. At the same time, many of the most prominent interventions in birth-related care rely on forms of intensified data collection, from hospitals’ electronic health records to new at-home femtech products. Yet this reliance on data comes with considerable risks, including its incorporation into carceral systems that monitor, constrain, and discipline Black individuals — a risk exacerbated by a post-Dobbs climate of increasingly restrictive reproductive health policies.

In Establishing Vigilant Care: Data Infrastructures and the Black Birthing Experience, Joan Mukogosi puts the risks of digital health technologies at the forefront of considerations about where, how, and by whom maternity care is delivered to Black birthing people. By considering the ways digital health technologies shape birth work and how birth workers shape digital technologies, and through extensive interviews with maternity care professionals, the report reveals methods of constructing and obfuscating health information systems. It confronts how systems of classification marginalize, pathologize, and even criminalize Black birthing bodies, and how datafication is embedded in these processes — inside and outside of the medical system. 

Illustration by Eliana Rodgers. This image is not licensed under Creative Commons.