Porsha Williams is ready to talk about her first miscarriage. The Real Housewives of Atlanta (RHOA) star recently revealed the role that racism in the medical field played in preventing her from receiving the help she needed.
“With my first miscarriage, I was actually sent home about three or four different times telling them that I was in pain, and I felt like I was going to have a miscarriage,” Porsha said during Bravo’s roundtable discussion, Race in America: A Movement Not A Moment. “It just goes back to doctors feeling like Black women have this serious threshold for pain,” Williams explained.
“You have to manage pain for patients, because that can trigger other things in the body. So I really do feel like the pain management around that time, I ended up having fibroids and that’s what was causing it, is what caused so much stress on my body that I ended up having a miscarriage.”
Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth because of complications than White women whose concerns tend to be taken more seriously.
“The disparities are huge,” Dr. Britten Cole of Married To Medicine shared during the discussion. “A lot of Black people, Latino people, they typically go to community hospitals, community clinics, and that’s where they get their healthcare. Why? Because they see doctors that look like them,” Cole continued.
“They speak their language, so they feel more comfortable there, and they know once they go to the big house, and that’s what we call the major academic institutions, they’ll get lost. There’s no one who speaks their language, no one who understands them, and no one who really cares about them,” Dr. Cole shared.
“So they get slower treatment, they get minimal treatment. They don’t get what they need, so they’re in these communities, they don’t have enough staff members, they have subpar equipment, so they don’t even have what they need in these communities.”
Porsha Williams has one child, Pilar Jhena McKinley, with her fiance, Dennis McKinley. Stay tuned for more Real Housewives of Atlanta family news!
Photo: Porsha Williams/Instagram
