After Charles Johnson's wife, Kira, died following the birth of their second son, he dedicated himself to fatherhood and sounding the alarm about maternal mortality
Credit: courtesy Charles Johnson; Demetrious Williams
NEED TO KNOW
- Charles Johnson’s wife, Kira, died in 2016 following the birth of their second son — another example of preventable maternal mortality, he says
- He has dedicated himself to raising his boys and sounding the alarm while working to solve an issue that kills hundreds of women each year in the U.S.
- “I will do this as long as there’s breath in my body, as long as there’s a need — but I hope to eliminate the need,” Johnson says. “My goal is to put myself out of business”
Charles Johnson describes himself as a humble soccer dad who, a decade ago, would not have imagined he’d become a crusader for women’s reproductive care.
But after his wife, Kira, died in 2016 following the birth of their second son, he dedicated himself to raising their boys and sounding the alarm about preventable maternal mortality.
“There's only two types of people in this country: Either you are a mother or you have one, so we all have a vested interest in making sure that every mother in this country gets to go home with their babies,” says Johnson, 45.
“Fortunately, I'm able to consult and train to be able to keep the lights on,” he says of his financial situation. But for many other families like his who face a maternal death, the loss may be devastating.
There’s no real solution, he says, “other than to prevent it.”
He knows firsthand: Kira, then 39, gave birth to their son Langston in April 2016 at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center via cesarean section.
The couple loved being parents to son Charles V (his dad is Charles IV) and were thrilled to welcome a second child, as they’d planned.
At the time, Johnson was set to produce a daytime television syndicated show in L.A. and Kira ran a hospitality consulting business. All seemed well, Johnson says, until he noticed blood in his wife’s catheter.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
He says he notified nurses and medical staff, who ordered blood work that confirmed hemorrhaging and a CT scan that was never performed. Kira's abdomen filled with fluid and flared with pain. She lost color, shivering and becoming sensitive to touch.
For hours, Johnson says, he begged nurses to pay attention but was told Kira was not a priority and she deteriorated.
She was ultimately taken for two surgeries and died.
It seemed unthinkable. She was "not just in good health, she was in exceptional health," Johnson told PEOPLE in 2022.
Suddenly he was a single dad and a widow, an experience that galvanized him to activism. As he came to learn, maternal mortality is a persistent problem in the U.S., an issue that experts have blamed on a complicated tangle of problems during immediate care as well as larger factors like racial bias. (Black women are some three times more likely than White women to die related to giving birth, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2024.)
“I help people understand the human aspect of it,” Johnson says, “what it’s like to tell your kid at 3 a.m. that his mother is never coming home.”
Credit: courtesy Charles Johnson
'As Long as There's Breath in My Body'
Johnson hopes to see zero maternal preventable deaths in the U.S. by 2030.
In 2017 he founded a nonprofit, 4Kira4Moms, focused on maternal health. Nearly a decade later, the organization has a response team that springs into action within 24 hours of a maternal death or a life-threatening near-miss for people who ask for help.
The group also supplies free diapers, wipes, formula, clothes and other essentials for a baby’s first year.
Sometimes an unmarried partner needs legal support to get their name on the baby’s birth certificate and some families need grief support, or baby sleep training, or even just babysitting.
Since 2021, the organization has helped more than 300 families.
Johnson has also testified before Congress, urging the passage of the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which became law in 2018. He returned to Capitol Hill in support of the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021.
His testimony, along with other advocates, helped secure some $200 million in federal funding to take steps at the state level to prevent more women from dying in childbirth.
All of that work is paying off, statistics show: The number of annual maternal deaths in the U.S. fell from a decadeslong high of 1,205 in 2021 to 649 in 2024.
“We’re definitely making progress — we're trending in the right way for the first time in a long time,” Johnson says. Yet “these mothers are so much more than statistics.”
Credit: courtesy Charles Johnson
While sections of the original Momnibus bill passed, Johnson would like to see the entire package be signed into law. It was reintroduced last month in Congress. The bill includes a provision honoring Kira that would include training for respectful maternity care without bias.
Believing Kira was ignored because she was Black, Johnson worked with federal regulators to investigate and fix unequal care at Cedars-Sinai, he says. Following an investigation, the hospital signed a voluntary compliance agreement to address the issue last year.
In a statement to PEOPLE, a hospital spokesperson says that agreement "demonstrates our continued commitment to ensuring safe and equitable outcomes through education, accountability and rigorous quality initiatives aimed at addressing disparities in maternal health."
"Cedars-Sinai values and appreciates those who advocate for greater awareness about disparities in Black maternal health, and we share a common goal of ensuring that all birthing patients receive high-quality, safe and equitable care," the spokesperson says.
The hospital did not comment on the specifics of Kira's case or care.
Johnson is also helping the family behind the WELLS Act, introduced in Congress last month, to prevent other women in active labor from being turned away at the hospital. The legislation — named for Mercedes Wells, who ended up delivering her baby in her truck — would create hospital protocols before discharging women in active labor and also includes racial bias training for healthcare professionals.
“I will do this as long as there's breath in my body, as long as there's a need, but I hope to eliminate the need,” Johnson says. “My goal is to put myself out of business.”
Credit: Demetrious Williams
'They Saved My Life'
Today, Johnson’s kids are getting closer to being preteens in Vinings, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta where they moved to be closer to family.
Not fully aware of their father’s advocacy work and why he takes work trips, the boys stay with an au pair when he’s away and have godmothers and aunts looking after them, too.
At home, giant photos of Kira hang on the walls. Johnson talks about his late wife all the time with their sons, telling them how proud she is of them, how she sees everything they do and how their curiosity and their fearlessness is just like their mom.
“They're smart and they're hilarious and they're good at everything, they're straight-A students, they're excelling beyond what I could have hoped, particularly with their circumstances,” Johnson says.
He says Charles’ competitive streak, mixed with his big heart, reminds him of his wife. Langston, who looks a lot like his mother, “has the same huge personality, huge infectious energy in a tiny body — he’s the smallest kid in all the sports he plays and the smallest kid in his class, but he walks into every room like a giant … and that’s very much how his mom was.”
“They ask random questions at random times,” Johnson says. “If I’m beating them at a board game, they’ll ask, ‘Could Mommy beat you?’ ”
Still, there is no good answer to a question such as a tearful, “Daddy, I really want Mommy to come to my birthday party — why can't she come?”
Credit: Demetrious Williams
“Not being able to fix it really is the hardest part,” Johnson says. “Our lives are very amazing, but there's nothing that can replace that loss.”
Johnson reaches out to other families every time he hears about a childbirth-related death. He remembers that overwhelming feeling.
“Oftentimes this may be your first child, and now you're thrust into trying to figure it out,” he says.
If needed, he’ll talk into the night with dads facing shock and grief and the prospect of parenting a newborn all alone.
Johnson has learned himself that being a single working parent requires some workarounds: He has been coaching his sons' soccer teams since they were 3 and he convinced the league to let him hold practice for one team right after the other and have Langston be “half mascot, half extra player” when his big brother’s team practiced.
With Johnson’s schedule packed with advocacy work, training on implicit bias and speaking engagements, he says, he hates to miss a soccer game and sometimes wishes he had a clone so he could be in two places at once.
He has coached hundreds of kids over the years, and he loves being recognized about town as "Coach Charles."
“I might have been going back and forth with senators, trying to convince them about this. I might have been on the phone last night till 3 a.m. with a dad who lost his wife. But when you get out there and you've got a bunch of 9-year-olds and they're just running around and they're excited and they're having fun — and then sometimes they're learning tough lessons about life, like the ref wasn't fair — it's so much fun,” Johnson says.
“It's this place of peace and pure fun where everything is just simple and I get to be a big kid,” he says.
He’s already dreading losing his coaching role next year when his sons move on to a more competitive league.
Though he says he’s open to finding a new partner, he still gushes about his wife. She spoke four languages, raced cars, ran marathons, liked to skydive and had a pilot’s license, and there are videos of her teaching Mandarin to baby Charles when he was just 6 months old.
The couple had discussed raising their boys to “change the world,” Johnson says, and he feels he has carried on those dreams by “prioritizing rich experiences over toys.”
“They’re mature beyond their years, understanding at such a young age what loss is. They are just empathetic to other people's situations. It's really cool to see,” he says, adding, “Honestly, they saved my life.”
Read the full article here
