A lawmaker proposed a bill that would ban DEI in medical schools. Doctors say it could roll back progress toward improving Black maternal health.

Doctors and professors at some of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools tell CNN the anti-DEI legislation could thwart efforts to teach medical students how to understand and communicate with different cultures and dispel racial stereotypes and myths in health care.

Dr. Versha Pleasant has dedicated her career to finding ways to erase the racial health inequities facing Black mothers. A clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School, Pleasant said she developed a curriculum that teaches the history of racism in obstetrics and gynecology in the US. The curriculum was part of a pilot project and covered James Marion Sims— a doctor who once performed experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, Pleasant said. This treatment, she added, inspired the false belief that Black women can withstand greater amounts of pain than White women. While Pleasant says she didn’t teach the material this year, she fears her efforts to reintroduce it could be challenged if a new bill targeting DEI efforts in federally-funded medical schools medical schools passes.  Last month, North Carolina Republican Rep. Greg Murphy introduced the “Embracing anti-Discrimination, Unbiased Curricula, and Advancing Truth in Education (EDUCATE) Act” would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit medical schools from getting federal funding if they adopt policies or requirements related to DEI, including promoting beliefs that a person’s sex, race, ethnicity or skin color makes them a member of an oppressed group, or that the US is a “systemically” racist country.