Your answer would make sense if “for whatever reason” was replaced with any factors that might be helped by the bill he’s introducing. If he were saying that black mothers tend to be rural (which isn’t really true) and this bill focused on rural aid to maternal health, then cool, he had a point. He didn’t link the help he proposes to what he said about race, so all this did was minimize the problem by calling it black. You’re right that it would be different if he called out the problem and then tried to address it, but he didn’t - he said “for whatever reason” and left it at that

The comment was: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.”

That’s not talking about the bill he’s proposing. Please tell me what you think “if you correct our population for race we’re not as much of an outlier” means. I’d like to hear your version, because he wasn’t talking about this as a huge problem that makes their stats devastatingly bad, he was saying that the stats aren’t as bad as they seem ~if you don’t count black women~ and I’d really like to hear your justification for that