A year or two after my first child was born, the CDC released a report showing that black women were three times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related causes.

And it may be nervous about being pregnant again, about being in a hospital, pregnant again.

And then the second time was around the spring of 2020.

Okay. It's 10.20 a.m. and I'm in early labor. So contractions, but they're, you know,

a regular or 10 minutes apart or, I don't're, you know, a regular 10 minutes apart or I don't know.

You just breathe through it, I guess.

I, like a lot of people, was afraid to leave the house because the news was grim.

I actually kept an audio diary of that time.

Deluge of cases begins hitting New York hospitals.

This is the headline that I've been looking for for the last week.

Like all the news that I'm obsessed with and watching and all this stuff, but I know what I've

been doing.

I've really been looking to see the moment when it says hospital, something, something,

deluge, something, something overwhelmed. And I'm at home waiting to go into labor. I don't know.

I don't know. In the 48 hours between when I entered the hospital and left with my child, there were no visitors allowed, and COVID-infected mothers were isolated from their babies.

Birth in a hospital was a radically different experience, an experience a growing number of women are opting out of.

We've got a special assignment for you today.

CNN Newsnight host Abby Phillip has been

reporting on this and she's learned more about what's happened since the emergency days of the

pandemic, how more women are deciding to give birth at home, why maternal mortality rates for

black women remain stubbornly high and the movement of people trying to change that.

I'm Adi Cornish. This is the assignment.

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