After losing her friend Shalon Irving to preventable pregnancy-related complications, Rep. Lauren Underwood transformed grief into action—pushing Congress to confront a crisis that disproportionately endangers Black mothers.
Excerpted from Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress by Maya L. Kornberg (published March 10).
The congressional class of 2018 focused on different issues than their predecessors.
For Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), her personal loss is one of the things that led her to cofound the Black Maternal Health Caucus to address a crisis facing Black mothers in America.
… Women are dying every day, and I am the first and only young Black woman who has ever been here.
Rep. Lauren Underwood
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are about three times as likely as white women to die of pregnancy-related health conditions.
One of the Black mothers to die tragically was Shalon Irving, Underwood’s friend. Irving was a successful scientist, who had befriended Underwood when they were both students at Johns Hopkins University.
Underwood recalled, “Shalon and I were good girlfriends. We would pass notes, go to dinner in Baltimore. We [would tell] each other about who we were dating.”
Irving died three weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Soliel, in the winter of 2017.
Underwood remembered going to the funeral: “It was … unimaginable. Her baby was there, her mom was there, the director of the CDC was there. All of these other uniformed public health officials were there, and everybody was stunned. Just like, how could this happen?”
According to an NPR and ProPublica investigation, Irving’s history of hypertension should have alerted doctors that she needed more monitoring, and she may have been a victim of the same discrimination many pregnant women of color face.
Underwood sponsored the 2021 Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act, which addresses inequities in housing, nutrition and transportation that shape maternal health outcomes, and which contains plans to improve maternal mental health resources and data collection and to combat racial bias in prenatal care.
Underwood’s advocacy is a direct result of her personal experience.
“I was standing at the press conference trying not to cry,” she recalled of the announcement about the Black Maternal Health Caucus. “We did this because women are dying every day, and I am the first and only young Black woman who has ever been here.”
For Underwood, this was an important lesson in the power of members to shape legislative agendas.
“I think that American people assume that Congress works on the issues that are most important for our country. No, Congress works on the issues that its members raise. And if you do not have a Congress that reflects the lived experiences of the American people, their issues don’t get raised.”
Editor’s note: The Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021 did not itself become law, though some of its provisions were passed in the House as part of the Build Back Better Act.
Copyright 2026. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Excerpt lightly edited for style and clarity.
In her new book Stuck, Brennan Center senior research fellow Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last 50 years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change.
