THE gap in maternal mortality rates between black and white women is widening, experts and mothers warned MPs today. 

Black mothers are five times more likely to die than white women in pregnancy and up to six weeks after giving birth. 

But today the health and social-care committee, led by Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, heard from maternity experts that this disparity is growing. 

Maternity-rights campaigner Tinuke Awe told the committee that she feared that future generations could be “10 or 15 times more likely to die, based on the current trajectory.” 

Ms Awe is the co-founder of  FiveXMore, a campaign set up to try to overturn the mortality statistics for black women in childbirth in Britain.

She set up the campaign after experiencing bias when giving birth to her son three years ago. 

Describing her experience, Awe told MPs: “I was left feeling like I wasn’t listened to, at all, and my pain actually wasn’t taken seriously.

“The more I spoke to women in my immediate network … I found that my experience was not an isolated one.” 

In 2018 the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Death report found that for black women the chance of death was one in 2,500,  five times higher than for white women. 

Professor of maternal and child population health at Oxford University Mary Knight told MPs that the disparity in mortality rates between ethnicities has been getting wider. 

“When I took over leading this inquiry, there was about a three-fold difference in mortality between black and white women, and it’s reached in the report we published in 2019 about a five-fold difference,” she said. 

Ms Awe said that the NHS needs to commit to a target to close the gap “and end this disparity immediately.”