Pregnancy Inequality
Social Awarness Campaign
Client: Independent
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign
April 2021
A client came to me with a subject that doesn't get nearly enough attention: the disparity in quality of care that pregnant women of color receive from healthcare workers compared to white women. The data is stark, and the consequences are deadly, and she wanted design pieces that could communicate that reality clearly and emotionally. I made three pieces, and from the start, I wanted them to feel like they belonged together.
The first piece uses typography as the entire image. Two silhouettes of pregnant women face each other. One is built from words associated with how white women are typically treated in healthcare settings, words like Priority, Relevant, Caring, and Fair. The other is built from words that reflect the experience of women of color: Mistreated, Ignored, Disregarded, and Scoffed. The word clouds that make up each figure also contain the racial identifiers of each group, woven throughout the body of text. You have to look closely to read what's there, and that discomfort is part of the point.
The second piece translates the same vocabulary into a comic-book visual language. Bold pop-art starburst shapes carry the same words across a white-to-dark halftone background that splits visually between the two groups of women. This is meant to explain how white women (white halftone) are viewed versus how women of color (dark halftone) are viewed. The format is deliberately jarring. Comic books are associated with entertainment and fantasy, and dropping words like Irrelevant and Cast Aside into that aesthetic creates a tension that makes the message harder to ignore.
The third piece is the most data-driven. A silhouette of a pregnant woman holds her belly, and where the baby would be, there's a pie chart showing pregnancy-related death rates by race from 2007 to 2016. Black women account for 40.8% of those deaths. White women account for 12.7%. The image doesn't need much text since the numbers and the figure say everything together that words alone couldn't.
All three pieces approach the same issue from different angles (emotional, visual, and statistical), and together they make a case that none could make alone.