As I finished reading a new book about the perils of pregnancy in the United States, ProPublica published a story identifying another victim of our broken healthcare system: Tierra Walker. The 37-year-old Texas mother had asked her doctor, “Wouldn’t you think it would be better for me to not have the baby?” after her early pregnancy symptoms included “unexplained seizures” and “soaring blood pressure,” ProPublica reported. But no one would help her. She was suffering from preeclampsia—a condition involving high blood pressure and a hazardous buildup of protein in the uterus—and instead of heeding her concerns, her physicians let her die.

I asked the author of the book I had been reading, Irin Carmon, what went through her mind as she learned about this latest death. Carmon—coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Notorious RBG and a longtime journalist covering gender, law, and politics, currently at New York magazine—said that Walker had done everything she was supposed to do. “She advocated for her own care, she showed up, she asked questions, she followed doctor’s orders, she understood what she needed, and she asked for it.” But, she added, “there is also a Catch- 22, particularly for Black women [like Walker], and there’s research that shows this: In advocating for yourself, you might be retaliated against. So doing all the things that you are supposed to do will not save you.”

This was also what happened to one of the five women Carmon profiles in Unbearable, Christine Fields.