When my daughter was 2 weeks old, she stopped eating. She would go nearly 24 hours without food, crying constantly and losing weight while seeming to be in excruciating pain. Over five months, I took her to more than 50 doctors appointments searching for answers, only to be dismissed as hysterical, hormonal or “over-medicalizing” my baby.
By the time doctors finally recognized that she was suffering from a milk allergy and reflux, the prolonged pain had caused bottle aversion—a life-threatening condition in which babies become too traumatized to eat. She was later diagnosed with ARFID, a trauma-based eating disorder that still affects her today.
What happened to my daughter forced me to confront a devastating question: Would we have been treated differently if I weren’t a woman of color? Research has repeatedly shown that Black women and children are less likely to have their pain taken seriously by medical providers, and over the last decade, federal programs aimed at identifying and addressing those disparities began making meaningful progress. But under the Trump administration, many of those initiatives are being dismantled in the name of fighting “DEI,” with funding slashed, bias training suspended and research into racial disparities frozen or erased altogether.
My daughter is now in preschool—playing, laughing and growing—but she still struggles to eat enough to meet her nutritional needs.
Our story is not an isolated tragedy; it is a warning about what happens when healthcare systems stop listening to mothers and when political attacks on equity research blind medicine to its own biases. If we truly value mothers and children, we cannot treat efforts to understand racial disparities in healthcare as expendable.
