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GUEST OPINION EDITORIAL

By Sarah Bobrow-Williams

The Trump Administration has signaled its intent to eliminate programs that acknowledge and address racial disparities in healthcare. His administration has already shown its willingness to defund reproductive health services, undermine Medicaid, and dismiss public health data that highlights racial inequities. If these policies continue unchecked, they will devastate communities like those in the Mississippi Delta, where Black women already struggle to access life-saving cervical cancer screenings and the HPV vaccine.

The Cost of Neglecting Preventative Services

A failure to invest in preventative healthcare does not just harm individuals—it places a long-term financial burden on the public. Mississippi currently has the highest rate of amputations in the country, a crisis that could be mitigated with better access to healthy foods and preventative outreach and health services. The same logic applies to cervical cancer prevention. Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable and treatable cancers when detected early, yet nearly 4,000 women in the United States die from it every year.

Mississippi leads the nation in cervical cancer rates, with Black women nearly 1.5 times more likely to die from this disease than white women and disparities only widening with age, leaving older Black women especially vulnerable.

Early detection and treatment save lives and reduce the overall financial strain on the healthcare system. Cutting funding for these programs only ensures that more people will require expensive, late-stage treatments that could have been avoided altogether. This is not just a public health crisis—it is a human rights failure.

What’s at Stake for Black Women in the Delta

The Mississippi Delta has long been a region of both hardship and resilience. For generations, Black communities here have fought to carve out better futures despite entrenched racial discrimination in healthcare, education, and economic opportunity –leading efforts to dismantle inequitable systems and demand the quality of care and information that all people deserve and need.

Yet, deeply-held biases about Black women continue to prevent access to quality care—

The tendency of healthcare providers to dismiss or override Black women’s choices, assuming they do not fully understand or cannot make informed decisions about their own health;

The legacy of forced sterilization, birth control experiments, and lack of informed consent in medical procedures contributing to Black women’s hesitancy to seek care

The stereotype that Black women can endure more pain or do not need the same level of medical intervention, leading to their concerns being ignored.

These biases are not relics of the past. They are present in the dismissal of Black women’s symptoms, the chronic underfunding of health programs serving Black communities, and the continued reluctance to invest in solutions that address racial disparities in health outcomes. Failure to recognize that systemic racism has had the residual effect of solidifying disparities in both access and outcomes means that the most vulnerable populations continue to suffer preventable harm.

At the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI), we are working to change this reality. Our participatory research project, conducted in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, has centered the voices and experiences of Black women in the Mississippi Delta to expose the systemic barriers contributing to preventable cervical cancer deaths. In January, SRBWI released its latest report, No Excuse: Inadequate Cervical Cancer Prevention and Care for Black Women in the Mississippi Delta, which highlights the persistent inequities in healthcare access and outcomes.

The findings in No Excuse demand urgent action. We call on state and federal leaders to:

Expand Medicaid to provide affordable healthcare access.

Increase funding for cervical cancer screenings and treatment programs.

Invest in transportation infrastructure to connect rural communities to healthcare facilities.

Launch public education campaigns to increase HPV vaccination rates and cervical cancer awareness and screenings.

We extend our deepest gratitude to the community-based researchers from Washington, Bolivar and Humphreys counties in Mississippi who made this report possible and to the 159 women interviewed who courageously shared their stories. Their voices are a powerful reminder that we cannot stand by while preventable deaths continue to devastate Black communities.

This Administration’s attack on public health and refusal to address disparities in health outcomes is an attack on the fundamental right to healthcare.

The question is not whether we can afford to resist these dangerous policies. The question is: Can we afford not to?

Sarah Bobrow-Willams is Program Director for Participatory Research and Community Assets at the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI).