Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools

Navigation

You are here: Home / News / MacDorman comments on Maternal Mortality Rates

MacDorman comments on Maternal Mortality Rates

Rates of women dying during childbirth in the US have been unaccounted

Kim Brooks, writing for the New York Times, reports on how Americans are blaming expectant mothers for their own death. Previous research has shown higher rates of maternal mortality and injury when compared to those in other developed countries. In addition, doctors aren’t required to hand over their dead patients' numbers and state officials have argued than it’s better to focus on other issues related to maternal health than on what may have gone wrong with each women’s cases. Faculty Associate Marian MacDorman commented on the US involvement regarding the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of cutting maternal death ratio by 75 percent: “Nothing was being done, partly because nobody knew what was going on. The data we had was bad […]. This created a data mess where nobody could figure out what the national trends were […] huge missed opportunity for intervention in conjunction with the Millennium Development Goal.” 

From 2006 to 2013, the maternal mortality rate in the US has increased from 13.3 to 22 deaths in 100,000 approximately. And these numbers don’t take into account the women who are injured during delivery or during the process of it suffering trauma and near-death experiences. MacDorman concludes, “The National Center for Health Statistics, which is the government agency responsible for publishing maternal mortality data, completely stopped publishing it.”

 See the complete New York Times article 

Filed under: ,