Maternal deaths in the U.S. spiked in 2021, CDC reports
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NPR
Wanda Irving holds her granddaughter, Soleil, in front of a portrait of Soleil's mother, Shalon Irving, at her home in Sandy Springs, Ga., in 2017. Wanda is raising Soleil since Shalon died of complications due to hypertension a few weeks after giving birth.
In 2021, the U.S. had one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the country's history, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report found that 1,205 people died of maternal causes in the U.S. in 2021. That represents a 40% increase from the previous year.
These are deaths that take place during pregnancy or within 42 days following delivery, according to the World Health Organization.
The U.S. rate for 2021 was 32.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, which is more than ten times the estimated rates of some other high income countries, including Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan and Spain which all hovered between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 in 2020.
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data from the World Health Organizatio
n, the maternal mortality rate in high-income nations overall was 12 per 100,000 live births in 2020, while in low-income countries it was 430 per 100,000.
International comparisons of maternal deaths are difficult because of differences in methodology in tracking the data, warns the author of the new U.S. report, Donna Hoyert, a health scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, at the CDC. But, she notes, the U.S. is "usually not faring all that well" on maternal mortality.
"There is just no reason for a rich country to have poor maternal mortality," says Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. The CDC's latest compilation of data from state committees that review these deaths found that 84% of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. were preventable.
The increase in maternal mortality in 2021 was "seen broadly across different age groups and race and Hispanic-origin groups," says Hoyert.
She connects the increase in maternal deaths to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We had some forewarning with the increase between 2019 and 2020 that it looked like maternal mortality rates were increasing during this pandemic period," she says. "With the overall COVID deaths that occurred in 2021, there was a shift towards younger people, so those would be in the age groups where people would be more likely to be pregnant or recently pregnant."
She says provisional data suggest the deaths peaked in 2021 and started to go down last year. "So hopefully that's the apex," Hoyert says.
Yet some experts worry that other trends around the country could make these figures worse, not better, including abortion restrictions that can delay care for pregnancy complications, and staffing problems at hospitals and closures of rural maternity wards.
The maternal death rate among Black Americans is much higher than other racial groups; in 2021 it was 69.9 per 100,000, which is 2.6 times higher than the rate for White women.
Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 4:02 am