‘Aftershock’ Examines the Fallout of the Black Maternal Mortality Crisis
The new documentary tells the stories of two young women who suffered preventable deaths, and of the activists working to protect Black mothers.
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In October 2019, Shamony Makeba Gibson, a 30-year-old Black woman, collapsed in her Brooklyn home two weeks after giving birth to her second child. Though she’d experienced symptoms of a blood clot, the question that medical professionals asked again and again as they treated her was whether or not she was on drugs.
“Next set of people come in, ‘Is she on drugs? Does she use drugs,’” Shamony’s mother, Shawnee Benton-Gibson, says in the documentary Aftershock. “‘I just told your colleagues, I’m telling you.’ Then another round of people come in—‘Is she on drugs?’”
Gibson—who was not, as her family insisted again and again to healthcare providers, a drug user—died of a pulmonary embolism, the condition her mother suspected she was suffering from all along.
Aftershock, which premiered on Hulu Tuesday, examines the Black maternal mortality crisis through the tragic and preventable deaths of Gibson and another woman, Amber Rose Isaac. The film, directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee, follows their survivors as they struggle with the loss of their partners, sisters, and daughters—the aftershocks that give the film its title—and funnel their grief into activism.
“Both of these families were very much interested in having a conversation about what was happening,” Lee said in a Zoom interview with Jezebel. “And so we all came together as collaborators, wanting to have this conversation and raise awareness beyond the communities that already knew about what was happening around Black maternal health.”
The U.S. maternal mortality rate is more than twice that of peer nations like Canada and the U.K., but the dangers childbirth poses to Black American women are particularly stark. Nationwide, Black women are three times more likely than white women to suffer childbirth-related deaths, and the gulf is even wider in New York City, where Black women are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts.
Eiselt, the director of the 2018 documentary 93Queen, which followed the efforts of Hasidic women in Brooklyn to establish a women’s EMT corp, partnered with Lee, who’s served as a producer on projects like the film adaptation of Walter Dean Myers’ Monster and the TV series She’s Gotta Have It, which was created by her husband, Spike Lee. They were initially inspired to create Aftershock after the publication of a ProPublica investigation that helped put the Black maternal health emergency into the national spotlight.