April Valentine walked into a Southern California hospital in January 2023 prepared to give birth to her first child, a baby girl. All Valentine wanted was to take her newborn home and shower her with love and affection, but she never got the chance. She passed away during childbirth, a death health advocates say shouldn’t have happened.

Valentine’s official cause of death was listed as blood clots, but public health leader Adjoa Jones says plans for a doula-assisted birth were ignored, and Valentine was not being listened to by medical staff when critical issues developed — definite factors in her tragic end.

Jones, who serves as chief of Los Angeles County’s birth equity unit and director of its African American Infant/Maternal Mortality Prevention Initiative, shared Valentine’s story

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