Episode 32: Black Maternal Health with Antonio Reynoso

Dr. Sophia:

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Sophia obgyn podcast. I'm an obgyn practicing for over 15 years in my native New York City, and I love to help women learn about their bodies, empower them, and embrace themselves. On this podcast, we talk openly and with heart about all things affecting women from pregnancy, menopause periods, sexual health, fertility, and so much more. Disclaimer, this is general medical information. Based on my professional opinion and experience. For specific medical advice, please refer to your physician.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Dr. Sophia ObGyn podcast. We are so thrilled, especially in this week of Black Maternal Health Week that we get to have as a special guest, Mr. Borough president of Brooklyn himself, and in the house Antonio Reynoso.

Antonio Reynoso:
Thank you guys so much for having me.

Dr. Sophia:
We are so excited to have you. I just wanna give a little shout out to you and give a little bit of a blurb of exactly who you are. First of all, being the youngest borough president, elected the first Latino borough president elected, and before this, you were a staunch advocate even before you got into the borough presidency for black maternal health. So is there anything you would like to just make sure that I didn't miss in that little blurb about you?

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah, I think you're gonna hear a lot during this program. I'm really excited about this to talk to, to both of you. But my upbringing and where I came from, you know, my parents were both immigrants from the Dominican Republic that came to this country with welfare food stamps, section eight, WIC. I was born in Berland Hospital. So the government really showed up for me when I was a young person. I think those opportunities helped me get to where I am today. It really drives who I am. But I like to start off by letting people know where I came from and why these things are so important to me. I am one of many firsts and I'm deeply proud of that.

Dr. Sophia:
Well, we are so insanely excited to have you here on our program. I think I'm just gonna start with a couple of stats. You know, it's super important for people to understand the gravity of this problem or why we even talk about black maternal health. Black women in the United States are dying at a rate of three to four times that of their white counterparts. When we talk about New York City, we're talking about up to eight times. if we go into very specific ethnic groups such as those that I relate to being right across the aisle there from you, I'm a neighbor as a Haitian American you know, that can be as high as 12 times. So why don't you tell us a little bit more on how black maternal health just became a real dominant issue for you and how it became really personal to you.

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah. So when my wife was pregnant, our first child, Alejandro, we were looking for where to have the facility, and what hospital would be best for her to experience this sacred birth. We went to a private, you know, hospital in Manhattan. There were no midwives. We had, you know, 15 minute meetings and we were kicked outta the hospital. It didn't seem like they were hosting the process of having children or, or, or having a baby in a sacred way. My wife didn't feel comfortable. So we went to Woodhull Hospital, and in Woodhull Hospital we met Helena Grant, who was the midwife at our midwife that we didn't know was the Great Helena Grant. So we just happened to be very fortunate to have her with us.

Dr. Sophia:
Okay. So that hospital is in Brooklyn?

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah. So Woodhill Hospital is one of the three public hospitals in Brooklyn. they have or had one of the more exemplary, extraordinary midwifery programs in the entire state in Woodhull Hospital. I knew that maternal health, black maternal health specifically, was a problem, but I didn't know the gravity of it all. It wasn't until I met Ms. Helena Grant, that she communicated to me that my wife was eight times more likely to die during childbirth than a white counterparts. I said, how is that and what can I do to be helpful?

And she said, you know, your baby's gonna be born in six months. There's nothing you can do at this moment to improve her outcomes. There's so much institutional and so many historical issues that make it so that we won't be able to see progress in a way that could affect, you know, your wife's experience in a positive way. I told her, if I ever got the opportunity to do something regardless, power, influence or money, that I was going to change the way we thought about black maternal health here in Brooklyn. I got elected to be president shortly after that. I had a follow through on the commitment and the promise I made. But it all started with my wife, as a black man, as an Afro-Caribbean man, Afro-Caribbean woman. We were, it was a sad thing to hear that there was very little we could do in the greatest city in the world to save my wife or improve those outcomes for my wife.

Dr. Sophia:
Wow. What you say is absolutely correct that that concept or that feeling of just feeling powerless in a situation that seems to just be so pervasive throughout the system, throughout this, not only this city, but throughout this country. What do you think was different in your experience ? I mean, she's obviously had a great experience with a safe delivery, let's just put it that way.

Antonio Reynoso:
So I think there were two things that Ms. Elena Grant and then, you know, that she did. C-Sections were off the table and it was only of last resort should we need a c-section or an emergency case. In many hospitals c-sections are an easy way out. They move through it very quickly. They don't wait long. They don't wait enough time to see if there are all alternatives. especially if they're black women, they're just going right into cutting them open.

And because of the historical health complications, the inability to coagulate high blood pressure issues, so many issues that makes it so that there's a higher risk of death when you do unnecessary c-sections. there was just a plan for the c-section conversation. If we need to get there, we will get there, but we're gonna do everything we can to prevent that from happening., and the plan was there. So I felt good about that. My wife would only have to go through that if it was medically necessary, not, not because it was medically easier. The second thing that she did was my wife had a voice.

There was one time for our second baby, they tried to take him out of the room to go weigh him. Odessa Finn was in the room and asked the nurse, why are you taking the baby out of the room? Our policy is to keep the baby with the parents or the mother at all times. He's like, oh, I'm just gonna go weigh him. He's like, no, you bring the scale to this room and you weigh him here. that advocacy that she did, my wife and I were uncomfortable, but we don't wanna say anything because it's a nurse. It's a person in a white jacket, and there's like a power dynamic there. The midwives in Woodhull always made sure that the power dynamic was with the patient, always with the mother. Those two things are things I don't necessarily know we would've gotten somewhere else.

So it was just a plan to only do what was necessary on a c-section front, and also give my wife an opportunity to be her greatest advocate and should we ever feel uncomfortable to not be able to speak up, that they would speak up for us. That experience, I think, again, made it sacred, but also made it so that my wife felt heard, which is commonly the number one thing that black and brown women feel, don't feel when they're in these, these situations or having a baby.
Touseef Mirza:
So one thing I wanted to ask is whether you talked a lot in terms of the experience you had with the midwife, and I think we don't talk a lot about midwives in general. So how would you describe a midwife and what was her role actually in terms of the pregnancy?

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah, so we had an OB, we had a midwife, So we saw the OB twice. Okay. But the OB was not in the birthing room when we had-

Dr. Sophia:
Gotcha, gotcha.

Antonio Reynoso:
The two times we saw them, it was maybe 15 minutes. They were not there for a long time. The midwife was our entire process, 90% of it was with the midwife. We didn't exactly know what to expect from midwives. We didn't know what to expect of the entire experience. We just went in there knowing, and the statistics and the work that we've watched that midwives helped save lives. So we thought we needed one.

Dr. Sophia:
That's fantastic. I do think that you're making a very valid point. I mean, when we look at birth across the world, oftentimes it's attended by midwives with, you know, very, very good outcomes. I think that you, having made that kind of a choice was a great way-of-definitely in terms of mitigating a lot of risk. But I know that you've done a lot in terms of initiatives since you became borough president, especially having donated basically and made a financial commitment in a very big way to black maternal health. Can you just speak a little bit more to that?

Antonio Reynoso:
This is where I like to talk about scale and how important it's to go all the way. So the commitment I made while I was running for office the first time for borough president, I said that I will spend all of my money in my first year on black maternal health. That's it. Like, I would do that. I got $45 million from the city of New York to be able to allocate to capital costs. I ended up giving three public hospitals about $15 million each. They're going to have state-of-the-art birthing centers because of it. I'm not talking about the other places. They've given a million dollars or $2 million and made a difference. We're talking about complete gut renovations and having, you know, having tubs, meditation rooms, these showers that hit you from all sides. So you could get massages, like really doing something that is an experience that would be unusual in a public hospital that a woman on Medicaid would traditionally not feel that she would have access to.

But not here in Brooklyn. If you go to a public hospital, you'll have facilities that you don't see anywhere else in all of the city of New York. I would challenge myself all over the world. so I wanted to make sure I could give that experience to people because I wanted infrastructure to not be the excuse. We got a lot of work to do, and a lot of deaths happen for other reasons, but infrastructure should never be the reason

Dr. Sophia:
That's amazing. I mean, I fully agree with you that, you know, all women, regardless of how they're able to pay for their medical services and their healthcare, should feel that they're getting equal experience. However, we know that black and brown mothers do not have that experience. so just to start with a facility, at least when they walk in, they feel like people care about them. Just based on the way that the facility looks automatically starts to elevate the level of care that we expect. What other ways do you feel that you know, what other investments or what other areas or issues do you feel would also start to move the needle?

Antonio Reynoso:
So we did two other things. We did the second year, and it's baby boxes. So what we did, now everyone's talking about them. We were the first borough that gave out baby boxes. We did that because what we don't want is the mother to ever have to choose between diapers, between to, to worry about the stress of baby wipes you know, bottles and, and whatever it is that we need to give these kids a pump to encourage breastfeeding.

We did, we gave a lot of things in this. Our main goal was that the mother needs to be in a place of zen and joy after this experience, eliminating all the negativity or any obstacles that they could have the first month. this baby box wasn't gonna do it all, but it was gonna contribute to that. The next thing we did is we threw baby showers and community baby showers. So there are a lot of parents, like, you come from North Carolina, you come from Florida, you move here, there's no auntie, there's no grandma, there's no, there's just, like, you don't have a family support system necessarily.

So what we wanna do is be the village. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna throw a baby shower, which we threw in Brownsville and had 100 pregnant women show up. Gave them a bunch of, it was a baby shower. They had a big chair with balloons. They took pictures. We had music, we had food. The kids were running, other kids were running around. It was like a real family atmosphere. it's like, you know what? You might not have immediate family here, but you have your Brooklyn family, and we love you, and we want you to do well. We wanna show you, you matter. That also helped. The other thing we did was marketing, like educating people on birthing and understanding how, what it means. we take it for granted that yes, it is an act that has happened since the beginning of human life, but the education, the educating of people is not there.

They're not informed exactly what rights they have, where they should be going, how many times they get, or whether they should get checked up, all these things. We did that in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. Hmm. We did it in, and then we, we also put it up on bus shelters, in subway stations, if we are here targeting the people that are most vulnerable, we have to do it in Haitian Creole. These areas in Brooklyn that I have more Caribbean women, but specifically Haitian women. So we were thoughtful about all those things.
Then this year we have one last thing that we're doing, not last, but the, the next step is we have our first perinatal mental health accreditation program under Brooklyn College. So right now, if you're a therapist, if you're a doctor if you are a psychiatrist, if you are a daycare center worker, whatever it is that you do, and you're around pregnant women, you can go to Brooklyn College and get credits and a certification specifically to address maternal postpartum depression and maternal postpartum anxiety. Do that in a specific way. Right now, a therapist can help you with depression, but do they understand what it means to be depressed because of a process, after a birthing process?

And we don't know that this one is gonna be specifically tailored to do the, just that it's gonna be the first program of its kind in the entire state where you can be a, a therapist and then have a certificate through Brooklyn College that specifically says that you're a specialist in treating postpartum mental health issues. So that's something else we did, because we knew that I had to be a part of it. So I didn't just give money. I'm really trying to change the game here in Brooklyn. I hope that in four or five years, this is gonna be the safest place in all of the city to have a baby when we're done. That's the goal.

Touseef Mirza:
Well, you're really on track for doing that. It's amazing all the different initiatives you're doing. I think you're trying to look at this in a more holistic way, right. looking at the whole person in terms of what they actually lived, what their lived experience, and how to support that in different ways. One thing I wanted to go back to, because all of this that you invested in, that you put so much energy and your mission behind this is obviously because of this ridiculous atrocious stat that we said at the beginning, which is eight times more black women will die versus white women. The first time that Sophia actually told me this, I was just like, wait, can you say that again? And then she said it again. because I am a rational person, I said to myself is it because there's something physiologically different? Like, is there, is there a greater tendency for black women? Do they have certain sensibilities that white women don't have? And Sophia obvious obviously said-

Dr. Sophia:
No, absolutely not. 100%. No way. So we are all the same.

Touseef Mirza:
Then, because the question becomes, okay, then why? I know we say institutionalized racism, but I think it's important to actually understand what that actually means in the health space and how a black woman is actually treated.

Dr. Sophia:
So I'm just gonna say two things. First of all, there is absolutely no physiologic difference between a black woman and a white woman. Okay? We may have different lived experiences. That is true. We may come from many different backgrounds. That is true. But when it comes to black maternal health, one of the things that people really need to understand is that that happens to women, black women across the board. We're not only talking about poor women, and I know Antonio, you say this all the time, we're not talking about only black women who are poor or who we think are completely underserved, et cetera. We're talking about all black women having this potential statistic. They could be CEOs of companies. They can have master's degrees, doctorate degrees and other professional degrees. They can have an education that is far beyond the people who are actually taking care of them. Yeah. still have this exact same statistic, which is why, you know, it was so important for you to find, how can I mitigate this risk?

Antonio Reynoso:
I would say this, so I always go back to like, Serena Williams is arguably the closest thing to a superhero that exists on this earth, right? Physically is as close to a perfect physical specimen that you can ever see in your life. She is extraordinary by every measure. She is rich beyond means and has unlimited pots of money. So whatever experience she's gonna have during childbirth, you're, you're talking about a physical physical it, she's in the top 1% in the money wise. She's spending money in a hospital or with a doctor in the top 1%, everything goes right. She still almost lost her life during, during birth during her birthing process. It was a difficult one. She needed blood transfusions. All these things happened. we, we say like in, in infrastructure and like racism, institutional racism.

But I don't think a lot of people understand it. I'll give one example, like institutional racism that is real, is that black doctors, right? Black doctors while OBs tend to be- the OBs are doctors, right? And we have the amount of OBs that exist that are women of color, or are people of color is so small, it's so small compared to the demographics of the people having babies in New York, it's not even close, right? Until we don't start building a system by which we can encourage more black kids to wanna be doctors and have those kids enter a system that is fair for them, that is culturally respectful of them, like where they come from. Then from there, getting them into these hospitals. We gotta wait like 20 years. If we do it perfectly, we have a long way to go. What I'm doing, I really feel is the best I can do under the circumstances I have to, to try to put a bandaid on a gaping wound. What we really need to do is start from the cradle in the beginning and start building a system that can help black women.

Dr. Sophia:
I fully 100% agree with you that the major way in which we are able to start to really make some leverage in terms of change is with the education process. it's on all fronts. It's educating the patients so that they understand their birthing rights and the birthing process. Number one, it's educating the actual doctors, but before we get to the doctors, it's, as you say, inspiring and motivating black children to go to institutions where they will be, you know, where they will be allowed to shine basically in order to become, you know, motivated to become physicians, to become midwives, to understand their role in the healthcare space.

Antonio Reynoso:
So, Sophia, can I ask you some questions too?

Dr. Sophia:
Of course. Please do.

Antonio Reynoso:
There is a, a tension right now in our Brooklyn hospital system between midwives and OBs and like who should be in charge or what, who's the one person, I just wanna say, and I'm not gonna name who they are, but they said, Antonio midwives can do 95% of births great. It's perfect, and they're gonna do a great job. you don't ever need to see a doctor. But in that 5%, you're gonna, you're gonna pray with all your mic that there's a OBs you know, there's a surgeon that needs all these things, and we wanna be prepared for that.

And that's why the OBs are important. But now a coexistence here is hard to do. It's like art, not science. A midwife might say Dr. Dr. Sophia, she might say a midwife might say, we could wait another hour before we have to do a C-section. But OB would say, I think the C-section needs to happen now. like, how do you get to a place where there's some, like like again, it's an art form where there's some synergies that make it so that
that's not a conflict between midwives and OBs.

Dr. Sophia:
So actually it's one of the things that I like to say all the time is the fact that between, in the healthcare community, the concept of what is the role of the obgyn, the role of the midwife, the role of the doula, there are three completely separate, yet synergistically can bring about the best outcomes when it comes to patients. especially when we're talking about black mothers. Where we need help is exactly that in education, in order to take away this concept of the hierarchy, when what we really need to be is completely patient centered. Okay. So if we were really patient centered and we understood why we need the three different, those three different providers, and we're not leaving out our nurses, we're talking about everybody who is going to be at the touchpoint of the patient. But it's the understanding that everybody has an equal voice when it comes to advocating for the patient.

That's number one. Number two, improving the relationship, as you say between OBS and midwives, comes from an educational process that's not existent. Okay. I'll be the first to tell you that in my training. You know, when a patient came in, although I was trained at a hospital that did have midwives, and I'm very grateful for that because of the fact that I was able to, to watch the midwives with their patients and use, utilize a lot of their methods in terms of the approach to the patients. So I think it's in the education that if the doctors are not able to actually see the role of the midwife, because instead it seems as if there's constantly an adversarial relationship that because the midwife is quite unquote advocating for the patient, she's therefore against the doctor. We both have to come to a point where we understand what the actual complications are, what the waiting time is, and it's a matter of understanding who is in front of you.

And also we have to keep the ego on the side. there's no, there should be no ego in this. There really shouldn't be. No, there should be no ego in this. However, in the, just in doctors, for example, going through the residency programs, there's a hierarchy. So I think what we need to do is start to deconstruct the way we really do medical education. That goes across the board. Now, that again, is a very lofty goal, but I definitely think we need to start somewhere., and I think including mid midwives as part of residency training.

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah.

Dr. Sophia:
As one, two, as far as medical students and nursing students, including coursework that has to do with institutionalized racism. How do we treat patients? How to actually have what's the word simulation, basically of different scenarios and situations and see how patients, how, how our providers respond to that. Across the board is the way that we're going to be able to check out our own biases. How do we start that? Where do we start? That is the question.

Antonio Reynoso:
My next goal is gonna be to figure out a way to bring us together. Because you said something that was so important. There should be no egos and they should be about the patient and their experience. we're not there yet. I wanna get to that place because that is a struggle.

Dr. Sophia:
Yeah. There's no question about that. So, you know, that's definitely something that we can all look forward to is the concept of how we bring the healthcare providers together so that they're always staying patient centered. But what are the areas that actually give you hope in this basically fight for black maternal health and, and the concept of advancing education.

Touseef Mirza:
Can I go back before we go into the hope part? Because I still wanna drill down on one thing and then we'll come back now.

Dr. Sophia:
Okay. Of course.

Touseef Mirza:
I still wanna go back to what we talked about 8 times. So why does it happen? Like in terms of the day to day, what is the relationship of a physician to a patient of a black mom or mom to be that incurs this type of prevalence? What has, what would you say?

Antonio Reynoso:
I'm gonna do my, because what I try to do, especially with, with black men, is just like, have a very simple message to try to really get across people like what it's, and if you are taken seriously in a hospital and you're a black woman and you go in there, you might have diabetes, you might have hypertension, you might have a whole bunch of things. A good hospital will find that out long before you're in the birthing process, and they will build out a plan of action for you throughout your entire pregnancy. In private hospitals, for white women, this happens all the time. They know exactly what the white women's needs are long before they're having their baby. they've prepared, they've done work prior to the pregnancy, and they're prepared during the pregnancy to address whatever those issues are for them.

For black women, they don't do that. Not only do they not do that, when black women express themselves that there are issues that they need to be addressed, they go ignored. Studies have found that the pain threshold is an assumption that black women can hold stand pain longer than whitewood. So when they're saying that they're in pain, that they don't back off, that the doctor keeps going or that keeps doing something, and then in doing so, harms the patient even more. A white woman wouldn't have to go through that because the biases that exist exist like the strong black woman. So her pain that she's saying, she, she can hold on longer. So little things like that, a plan of action earlier in the process to prepare for whatever outcomes might happen can save a ton of lives.

But they don't, they're getting these, they're cycling these women through like with very little respect for the process, with very little respect for them. It just happens that in our city most black and brown women are poor, right? So we're talking about hospitals that are just churning these folks out. They're not getting paid a ton of money through Medicaid for these services. They have substandard infrastructure. All these things are happening. Then after that, with mental health with prescription drugs and like not educating them properly on exactly what they should be doing when they're in pain after a process they could have internal bleeding and they're sent back home because they're not properly checked because they don't believe what they're saying. They don't believe black women when they say they're in pain, all those things add on.

Touseef Mirza:
Then a more critical situation can arise because of that.

Dr. Sophia:
That's exactly what happens.

Antonio Reynoso:
It sounds absolutely insane when you hear it. That one per group of people has a certain type of experience and others don't. But it's just ultimately, it just comes down to listening to, to black women. I think a big part of it. that doesn't happen right now.

Touseef Mirza:
Listening and believing in them. Yeah, I think that part is just so important to this conversation because if we wanna look at it from a holistic perspective, that is such a big piece of the pie. That's probably one of the hardest things to address because it's really about perception and institutionalized and systemic. But we still have to talk about it to understand the whole issue at large.

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah., and I just wanna say this, but also like, dealing with biases. One thing is teaching a bunch of white doctors not to do that. Not to have those biases. Another thing is having enough black doctors where the, you know, that's, you don't, those biases don't exist, but we don't have them. So now we expend a ton of resources and money to educate a whole generation of mostly white doctors to learn how to treat black women versus expending all those resources to just simply get more black doctors in the room and have more diversity in the doctor's pool. So for Dr. Sophia, like, I want to be honest, it is such a rare thing to have a black woman doctor. It's so rare that when people see it, they can't believe it.

Dr. Sophia:
It's so true.

Antonio Reynoso:
It shouldn't be the case.

Dr. Sophia:
You're a hundred percent correct. At least even if we started with having more black physicians in the room, they can at least identify more culturally with the person that's in front of them, and therefore apply a much more sensitive lens when it comes to the treatment of those patients.

Touseef Mirza:
One thing I wanted to ask, which I think was really good that you talked about, is that you are a male voice and you're very proud of being a male voice in this space. Usually women will take on this topic. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Antonio Reynoso:
Yeah. We need to make sure that we have voices, mostly black men, to stand up for the women black women and these issues. on also to understand that this is not a woman's issue alone. This is a societal issue. Healthy birth outcomes lead to healthier, you know, long-term just human outcomes. so when I felt that I didn't know it was gonna matter that much. I always felt a little out of place. I'm not a black woman, but I'm here talking about this issue. But when I started doing it, the support I got from black women and saying, thank you so much, that it's not only us screaming at the top of our lungs to listen to us, that there are other people that hurt us and that are a part of the team and our allies in this work has been extraordinary.

And I couldn't tell you how proud I am of this work to do this. Remember, I'm part of a team. don't move without calling them. I don't move without talking to them. We might disagree on certain things, but they know that I'm centered around my task force, which is led by all black women. I am just like a, I say I'm a megaphone, a boombox for their advocacy. Ms. Grant always tells me she disagrees wholeheartedly. She's like, you're more than that. I get emotional just thinking about it, but most of us need more men to be a part of this fight and not make this solely a black woman issue. This should be a human issue that we all take on.
I'm focused on taking care of black women, but everybody reaps the benefits of that work. Nobody's gonna say, hey, Antonio built this. Only black women can have babies in these hospitals. That's not what's gonna happen. No. All these things that you're seeing that are coming to fruition are all because I've censored black women, but are gonna help all women.

Dr. Sophia:
I think you've really eloquently expressed why this is an important issue. moreover, how Brooklyn is really standing in the forefront of making those changes that we're, you know, as a whole, we hope to make give us some of your lasting words or the, you know, what else would you like us to, what, what else would you like to see in your borough?

Antonio Reynoso:
This is the most women that we've had in the city council at the state level, and so forth. it just still doesn't feel like it's enough. Like people don't know what big means. We have small, narrow-minded people. Instead of having dreamers be a dreamer, you can shut things down and rebuild them to do what you want to do. I just want people to have bigger ideas, bigger dreams, do something that is completely outrageous, because this is an outrageous issue that needs an outrageous response. Right? Like, you gotta meet the crisis moment with a crisis level reaction. we don't do that right now. So that's what I wanna inspire. I'm hoping I'm inspiring a new generation of young electeds to want to get more involved. then the last thing is the black doctor movement is big. There was a time when everybody wanted to be a doctor and a lawyer and this, and it's just like we stopped. We stopped telling our kids they could be that. We should be doing significant scholarships to help young black kids achieve their dreams in a way that doesn't make it physically impossible.

Touseef Mirza:
I would also say, you know, all these amazing initiatives that you're doing that are helping black mothers and just mothers at large, just the fact that you have a voice and talking about this is already huge. Because now people have to look at where the money is spent, where usually this is not a point of focus, right. From leaders. So now people have to say, oh, black maternal health, why are we focusing on this again? Like, what's going on? So just, just that level of initiative is opening up more culturally this type of conversation where we didn't have before. So, kudos to you to do that.

Antonio Reynoso:
Thank you. I wanna, I wanna talk about maternal health so much that I want people to roll their eyes every time. I want them to be like Antonio's talking about this again. I wanna be so annoying to them. It is like, again, every state of the borough, I have a new initiative. It's like, okay, he did maternal health last year, so he is not gonna talk about it this year. It's like, no, I got more to do. I'm returning
You know what, until we don't break that inequity down to zero, I can't stop. I just hope that I'm able to continue to be in this work longer so that I can get to a, to really eradicate any, any inequities in this borough. I feel like we're gonna get there and I'm excited for it.

Dr. Sophia:
Wow. Antonio Renoso, Brooklyn Borough President, I cannot thank you enough for joining us here on the Dr. Sophia ObGyn podcast. Your energy and your light, the torch that you are carrying for this movement, for this incredibly, you know, this incredibly big issue is really palpable. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, as a black obgyn, as a black mother, as a woman who went through the system who had two kids and experienced the whole thing. I only wish I had Antonio Renoso at that time.

Antonio Reynoso:
I thank you guys, thank you guys for continuing this work and that I could just, I'm honored to just be a guest, to be a part of this process. This movement has been, has been a joy and an honor of my, of my life and definitely of my tenure here as borough president. I'll be here with you guys doing this work and call on me whenever you need me, and hopefully when I'm done, if I get the pleasure of continuing to be the borough president. But when I'm done in five years, we're gonna see statistics in Brooklyn that are gonna blow everyone's mind. Once we have the model, I hope every single borough does it. New York City really becomes the motto of all of this nation on how to protect black women and all women during childbirth.

Dr. Sophia:
Amen to that. Amen to that. Thank you so much.

Touseef Mirza:
Thank you so much, Antonio. Thank you. This was awesome.

Dr. Sophia:
Thank you.

Touseef Mirza:
And thank you to our listeners.

Dr. Sophia:
Yes. Thank you so much to our listeners, our community at large for joining us on today's podcast. Bye everyone.

Thank you for joining us on the Dr. Sophia podcast. Until next time. Bye. This is general medical information based on my professional opinion and experience. For specific medical advice, please refer to your physician. Until next time, embrace your body. Embrace yourself.