For the longest time, when Alea Lovely thought about birth, she also thought about death. “Since I was 10 I said, ‘I don’t want to have kids because I don’t want to die,’” said thelovelyalea, a 38-year-old podcaster who lives in South Kansas City. “If there was a fear of giving birth, then I had the phobia.” So two years ago, when Lovely got pregnant and spent three days in painful labor before she was told she needed a cesarean section, she told her doctor she was scared she would die. An hour later, after suffering a postpartum hemorrhage, she nearly did. Lovely knew that as a Black woman, the odds were stacked against her. Black women in the United States are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, and Missouri, where Lovely had her baby, has had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country for years — the 12th worst in the nation. Kansas ranks 17th worst. And while 650 to 700 people die of pregnancy-related problems every ...