In viral video, a Philly-area clinic staffer berates an expectant mother for asking for a doctor’s note to take off work

A Delaware County woman deserves a public apology after a staffer at a Norristown pregnancy clinic was captured on video aggressively questioning the health concerns of a Black pregnant patient seeking a doctor’s note to leave work, her lawyer told The Inquirer.

A video of the episode went viral on social media this week, where commenters reacted with outrage and concern for the woman, who said she was experiencing extreme pain during her seventh month of pregnancy.

The patient’s lawyer, Briana Lynn Pearson, said in an email that the interaction between her client and the employee, who is white, is an example of deep-rooted racism in the medical industry affecting the quality of care for women of color.

Pearson said the staffer, who works at the Philly Pregnancy Center’s Norristown location, refused to give her client the note and then called the police on her after she asked for a second opinion from another provider at the practice.

The woman captured the staffer on camera, telling her that to take time off from work because of her pregnancy would be “fraud.”

The staffer’s questioning at times appeared to berate the woman for personal choices.

“What were you thinking about when you were pregnant — that you were not going to work?” the employee asked in the recorded interaction. “Because I had three kids. I worked up until the second they were born.”

“But am I you? Do you know how I feel?” the patient responded.

The Philly Pregnancy Center, which also operates a second location in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood, did not return an email asking for comment and was unreachable by phone.

“Jill, an African American woman, went to the Philadelphia Pregnancy Center at seven months pregnant, in pain, seeking medical care and was met with abuse, neglect, and discriminatory treatment because she is African American,” Pearson said in an email. Pearson did not provide her client’s last name, and the woman goes only by her first name on social media.

“The American health care system has been complacent with the disparate treatment of women of color for far too long.”

» READ MORE: New moms keep dying in the weeks after birth, and the risk remains highest among Black women

In a series of videos posted to her TikTok account, Jill said she had visited the office for a doctor’s note allowing her to leave work for the last two months of her pregnancy, because she’d been experiencing pain that made it difficult to do her job.

Jill said she described her pain. Then the employee examining her cut her off and examined her cervix “very aggressively.”

“It was painful,” Jill said in the video. She said the staffer then refused to give her a note to take to work. Jill responded by asking to speak to a doctor about the note, and was taken to a back office to speak to a doctor on the phone, she said.

Then, she said, the staffer said, “Please don’t take her to my office,” and Jill responded: “No one wants to go to your office. You’re a weirdo for that.”

That’s when the employee said she was calling the police, according to an account from Jill in one of her videos.

Officers did show up to the clinic, Jill said, and told her that the staffer felt “threatened.” Eventually, she said, the police left, and a doctor agreed to write her the note. While she waited, the employee came out to the lobby and confronted her.

That’s when Jill began recording.

The staffer tells Jill that giving her a doctor’s note for her pain would be “fraud.”

“It’s not fraud,” Jill responds. “If it was fraud, the doctor wouldn’t be getting me a note right now.”

At one point in the video, Jill stands up from her chair in the lobby, making it clear she’s recording; the staffer taps her with a laptop case and says she’ll call the police again. “Look how she’s hitting me,” Jill says.

Pearson said her client deserves a public apology “and so much more.”

Despite intense attention from lawmakers and public health leaders in recent years, maternal mortality rates have continued to rise in the United States and the gap between Black and white patients has widened, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Black people are four times as likely as white people to die of pregnancy-related causes. They have greater odds of receiving insufficient pain medication, having their concerns ignored by doctors, and experiencing complications, such as dangerously high blood pressure, at greater rates.

These health disparities are complex and there is no single cause. But reams of research show that institutional racism and unconscious bias among doctors contribute to a disparity that persists across education strata and class lines.

Chidinma Nwakanma, a professor of clinical emergency medicine at Penn Medicine, called the exchange caught on video “disheartening.”

“Calling the cops on a pregnant patient, where we historically note that Black people aren’t treated well by the police, especially if they’re called for a threatening nature, this could have escalated into something much larger than it already was,” she said.

Nwakanma said videos like this can help bring awareness to issues around patient interactions and professionalism in health care. It’s important, she said, for providers to “take our personal feelings out of the equation.”

A cervical examination like the one Jill said she had, Nwakanma said, isn’t enough to gauge the level of pain she might be experiencing. She added that a health-care provider also shouldn’t assume that a patient’s pain or experience is the same as theirs.

“Patients aren’t trained to be patients — you have a responsibility as a medical professional to be professional at all times,” Nwakanma said.

Staff writer Sarah Gantz contributed to this article.