Another Woman Dies in Childbirth at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn

The pregnant woman’s due date was approaching when she arrived at a troubled public hospital in Brooklyn last month, complaining of stomach pain and nausea.

The woman, 24 years old and once a track-and-field star, was examined at the hospital, Woodhull Medical Center, and the medical staff told her to go home. But the nausea and stomach pain worsened. When she came back three nights later, she was admitted to the hospital and given a bed.

By the next day, she would be dead, after her baby was delivered by an emergency C-section, according to interviews with a medical worker at the hospital and the woman’s relatives.

The woman, Bevorlin Garcia Barrios, is the third woman to die during childbirth at Woodhull Medical Center since 2020, deepening concern about the beleaguered hospital’s ability to safely provide maternity care and deliver babies. Even before this latest death, Woodhull Hospital had emerged as a symbol of what New York City’s health department calls an “ongoing maternal health crisis” in the city. Woodhull, which straddles the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, is one of 11 city-run public hospitals and has been long regarded as one of the weaker institutions in the system.

In New York City, more than 20 women typically die each year from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth. The racial disparities are especially stark: Black women were nine times as likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth than white women from 2001 to 2019, according to city data.

The circumstances of the previous two maternal deaths at Woodhull have drawn widespread attention and alarmed hospital regulators. It is unclear whether government investigators are examining this latest death. But if errors by doctors or other medical lapses are found to be a primary cause for Ms. Garcia Barrios’s death, the public hospital system could come under growing pressure to increase staffing or add new safety protocols. Within Woodhull, there has been concern that regulators might close the hospital’s labor and delivery floor, where some 1,300 newborns are delivered each year.