Why Finland? 

By Oluyemisi Bolarin, The University of Texas-Austin 

My name is Oluyemisi Bolarin, and I’m a rising senior at UT Austin completing a dual degree in Humanities Honors and Health & Society. Humanities Honors is an individualized, interdisciplinary program that lets students design a major around intellectual questions that don’t fit neatly into a single department. Mine is called Race, Reproduction, and Health Policy. 

This summer, I’m in Helsinki, Finland, conducting field research for my undergraduate thesis: a comparative analysis of maternal mortality in Finland and the United States, with a particular focus on what Finland’s model reveals about the structural roots of Black maternal mortality in the U.S. 

The numbers behind this project are stark. In 2023, Black women in the United States died from pregnancy-related causes at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 live births, more than three times the rate for their white counterparts. Finland, meanwhile, has maintained some of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world for decades.

The research itself centers on comparing how the two countries organize maternal care: how prenatal visits are structured, who provides care, and whether it’s continuous, what happens in the postpartum period, and how maternal health systems connect, or don’t, to broader social welfare systems. In Finland, care is decentralized and community-based. In the U.S., it’s fragmented in ways that fall hardest on Black women. I’m here to understand how Finland’s model actually works in practice, because the most important details aren’t always in the English-language literature. 

Getting here took longer than I expected in one important way. My research involves interviews with mothers, health professionals, and academics in Finland about the maternal care system and their experiences with it. That meant going through the IRB (Institutional Review Board) process, which reviews any research involving human subjects, and it was, to put it very gently, a journey in and of itself. I submitted my application, revised, waited, revised again. About 2 weeks ago, I finally got approval. I start my interviews next week. There’s something humbling about preparing to ask people to share their experiences with you, especially on a subject as intimate as pregnancy and birth. 

While I was waiting, Helsinki took care of me in ways I didn’t anticipate! 

I’ve been exploring the city slowly, learning how it works, learning how to move through it. I took a day trip up to Tampere, Finland’s second-largest city, and was struck by how different it felt.

And two weeks ago, I went to Helsinki Music Week, which showcases Finland’s rising music scene. The shows were in small venues across the city.

That feeling of being a guest is something I’m sitting with as I prepare for my interviews. My research asks structural questions about systems, policies, institutions, but the people I’ll be speaking with are not abstractions. Finnish mothers and the professionals who care for them have built their understanding of this system from the inside, over lifetimes. I’m coming in from the outside with a specific comparative lens. Holding both of those things at once, staying genuinely curious rather than just confirming what I already think I know, is the methodological challenge I keep returning to. 

What brought me to this project, ultimately, is the belief that the deaths of Black women in childbirth in the United States are not inevitable. The research is consistent on this point: the majority of maternal deaths in the U.S. are preventable. That means something in the structure is failing. Finland didn’t become one of the safest countries in the world to give birth by accident either, it built systems that treat maternal health as a continuous, community-embedded process rather than a series of isolated clinical encounters. I want to understand what that looks like from the inside, and what it would mean to bring those insights back into conversations about policy in the U.S.

I’ll be sharing updates throughout the summer as the interviews getunderway. Moi Moi! (That means ByeBye!)