A week before her big race, Bonnie Cochran Bence was mentally and physically ready to run.

Then, a driver rear-ended her car.

As any runner knows, an injury before a race can sideline even the most prepared athlete. And this wasn't just any race: Bence had been training for the Boston Marathon, where the best runners from around the world gather to compete.

Then again, Bence isn't just any runner. She's a 78-year-old retired teacher from Creve Coeur, Missouri, who ran her very first race in her early 60s and has run 33 marathons since.

This year's Boston Marathon was going to be her 16th consecutive trip to the prestigious race, but the car accident put that in jeopardy. She was sore the day after it happened, but otherwise unhurt. She decided she would swim every day, plus continue with her yoga practice, to try to heal her body in the few days before the big race.

"I'm going to go, and I really want to finish, but I will accept what happens on the 26.2 (mile) journey," she said when I spoke to her six days before the race.

It's this type of persistence, grit and attitude that has helped Bence run so far for so long later in life. She started racing by accident. In 2005, her four adult children -- three sons and a daughter -- planned to run a relay together in St. Louis. Her daughter had to drop out at the last minute, and her son asked Bence if she would step in and take her place.

"She tough, and she's athletic," said her son Rob, now 44. "We had a feeling she would be down for it."

She was indeed, and she had a great time running with her sons.

"It was the first time I ever ran a true race. I was running through Forest Park, and the crowd was yelling, 'Go, mom, go!'" she said.

Their family team did well, and her son Chris, now 42, suggested she run a half-marathon. He made a training plan for her, which she followed diligently, and the pair ran the St. Jude half-marathon in Memphis together.

After that race, Chris said that if she could double the distance while keeping the pace of her half-marathon, she could qualify for Boston. She started training again, this time adding a lot of cross-training through swimming and yoga.

The next year, in 2008, she qualified for and ran her first Boston Marathon. Since then, she's been a regular fixture on the route. There have been high points over the years -- running it with her son; placing third in her age group at age 70 -- along with low ones. In 2013, she was a couple of miles from the finish when a bomb killed three people and injured hundreds.

Through it all, she keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

Bence, who was born in St. Louis, lost her mother to ovarian cancer when she was 5 years old. Her father, Bob Cochran, was left to raise three children by himself. He was an accomplished golfer who played in several Masters tournaments and inspired her interest in athletics from a young age.

She graduated from high school at Visitation Academy, then entered the convent, where she stayed for 7 1/2 years.

"I found out it wasn't for me," she said.

She got married at age 30 and ended up teaching for 45 years. She dedicated herself to her teaching career -- often getting up early and staying up late to prepare for her classes. Chris said his mom puts the same effort into all her endeavors as she does with running.

"She pushes herself to be great in all phases of life," he said. "And she has an extremely high pain tolerance."

When she stopped qualifying for Boston through the time requirements, Bence began fundraising for the Special Olympics to get into the race. Her children say they are "super proud" of her.

On April 17, just a week after a car accident, she ran through rain and puddles to finish another 26.2 miles in Boston.

"Your story can have a happy ending!" she texted me that evening.

Like she has so many times before, she waved and blew kisses to the cheering crowd as she crossed the finish line.

Her sweet 16th Boston was in the books.

Once in a while, a public official reveals hypocrisy so blatant that the nation takes bewildered notice and recoils in actual disgust.

A man from Missouri recently claimed the throne as the internet's creepiest main character in a moment of stiff competition for the title. In a public hearing on April 11, Republican state Sen. Mike Moon appeared to reiterate his support for children as young as 12 having the right to marry with parental permission.

"Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12?" Moon asked. "I do. And guess what? They're still married." These comments came five years after Moon and 49 other Missouri Republicans voted against a 2018 bill to curb child marriage. (Thankfully, they were overruled.)

After his recent comments went viral and made national headlines, Moon told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I do not support adults marrying children."

Is it a relief that one of our lawmakers backed off a statement that seemed to endorse child rape? The bar is admittedly low, but is it this low?

Moon's desire for child brides to have the freedom to marry came back to light in the context of another argument about parental rights. This time, he's leading the charge to strip rights from parents seeking medical care for their transgender children. If we're following Moon's logic, the state must intervene to protect transgender children if a parent allows them to seek gender-affirming care, but the state should NOT intervene if a parent allows their middle school-aged daughter to get married. Got it?

In Missouri, an adult participating in sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 17 may be prosecuted for statutory rape. But one man's statutory rape is another man's wedded bliss.

Let's try a little thought experiment: If Moon had a long salt-and-pepper beard and his skin was just a shade or two darker, and if his words -- "Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12? I do" -- were spoken with a slight Middle Eastern accent, how quickly would his Republican counterparts have spoken out against him?

Moon's exchange with Democratic state Rep. Peter Merideth about child marriage was recorded on video, making it easier for the moment to go viral. The public reaction was as close to unanimous as you can get these days. Most of us do not know any 12-year-old kids who have been married, nor do we wish to. This is not a guy people would want around their children.

It takes something significant nowadays to break through the daily partisan outrage and provoke a genuine emotion. Most of us are worn down -- exhausted from the nastiness and hypocrisy in politics. Even when legitimately bad behavior from public officials comes to light, those on the same political "team" prefer to ignore or discount it.

For example, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was recently exposed by ProPublica for having accepted luxury gifts -- undisclosed, for years -- from a billionaire Republican donor with an extensive collection of Hitler memorabilia. By all accounts, this is unprecedented behavior. Thomas has never denied his questionable actions, but Republicans called the report a "smear" anyway.

Wouldn't it be refreshing for one of them to simply say, "So what? We don't care when it's Our Guy."

In that sense, the collective public shaming of Moon's statement has been oddly comforting.

We still know sleaze when we see it.

The jaw-dropping statistics have made headlines for the past several years: Black women in different parts of America are two to four times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth complications than white women.

The hard questions are why this happens and how to change it.

A new documentary, "Birthing Justice," premiering this week on PBS, offers some answers, along with stories of joy, fear and hope. The film reveals the human lives and communities impacted by the crisis in Black maternal health.

Executive producer Denise Pines, the immediate past president of the Medical Board of California, said that when she first heard the grim statistics, she couldn't believe them. She did not personally know anyone who had lost a baby or had a close-call pregnancy or childbirth.

"How can this be happening?" she thought.

She and her business partners decided to explore the topic by filming what was happening on the ground in critical hot spots across the country. Missouri, which has one of the highest rates of Black maternal death in the country, became one of those locations.

In Missouri, Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women. In St. Louis, Black babies are three times more likely to die before their first birthday than white babies.

Experts talked about why these disparities persist.

Kanika Harris, the director of maternal and child health for the Black Women's Health Imperative, said the biggest misconception is that something in the behavior of Black women -- their diet, exercise or habits -- makes pregnancy and childbirth more dangerous for them.

"There is nothing we are doing that is so different from anyone else in this country," she said. In fact, research that controls for income and education levels finds that Black women still die at higher rates from pregnancy complications than white women. The documentary cites multiple reasons: Black women are more likely to have undiagnosed conditions prior to pregnancy, are more likely to have their concerns and complaints ignored during childbirth, and are less likely to have access to postpartum care.

For all women, it's more dangerous to give birth today than it was 30 years ago: The overall maternal death rate in 1987 was 7.2 deaths per 100,000 live births; in 2021, it was 32.9. That's 10 times higher than many other high-income countries -- but still less than half of the rate for Black women in America, which reached 69.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021.

The most tragic part is that most of these losses are preventable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compiled data from state committees that review these deaths and found that 84% of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. were preventable.

"There's something deeply wrong when in 2022, we can't keep our moms alive," said Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, founder of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, in the documentary.

The role that bias and racism in the medical system play in the disproportionate number of Black maternal deaths is underscored throughout the film. Olympic track-and-field star Allyson Felix appears in the film to share her pregnancy story. She was unexpectedly diagnosed at 32 weeks pregnant with severe preeclampsia -- a life-threatening complication -- which resulted in an emergency C-section.

In a 2018 magazine interview, tennis champion Serena Williams revealed that she also experienced severe health complications after giving birth because doctors neglected to listen to her about her existing medical conditions.

"Birthing Justice" director and co-writer Monique N. Matthews says she didn't want to make a film that just highlighted the scary headlines. As a Black woman, she said focusing on the terrible statistics makes her think, "So, I have to be scared to bring life into this world, too?"

She wanted to tell a story about Black maternal health anchored in resistance and fueled by joy.

"Black joy is a weapon and a tool," she said.

The documentary contains interviews with people on the front lines working on solutions. That includes Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri, and its founder, Okunsola M. Amadou, who has helped train more than 200 Black doulas in St. Louis.

The documentary's website, birthingjustice.com, offers resources for those who are pregnant, along with a section on policy and legislative initiatives that viewers can advocate for to address these problems.

The film tells a compelling story of an unacceptable problem facing pregnant women in America.

More importantly, it shares ways we can change the system to save mothers' lives.