According to the Wall Street Journal (“WSJ”), 1,205 women in the United States died during or shortly after pregnancy in 2021. This is an increase of 40 percent over the previous year. This puts the USA back at the level of 1965, when 1,189 women died.
The maternal mortality rate in the US is higher than in any other high-income country. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it was 24 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020. In comparison, there are significantly fewer in France (eight), Great Britain (ten) and Canada (eleven). While maternal deaths fell in many countries between 2000 and 2020, in the US they rose by 78 percent.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Nawal Nour, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told WSJ. “We’ve been working so hard to steer the trend in the right direction and it just doesn’t look like we’re going in that direction.”
Pandemic has exacerbated situation
The pandemic in particular has had a major impact on the high death rate of recent years, according to doctors and health officials. They have exacerbated long-standing problems such as access to health care and heart disease.
Pregnant women are also at a higher risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid-19 – especially if they are not vaccinated, a study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Diseases (CDC) found. Research has also shown that lockdowns and fears of contagion have caused many people to put off essential treatments during the pandemic.
Poor health often as a cause
According to the CDC, one of the main reasons for the high maternal mortality rate is cardiovascular disease and pulmonary embolism. But uncontrolled bleeding and problems that can be traced back to high blood pressure are also mentioned as the main causes.
According to doctors, some complications during pregnancy and after childbirth can also be attributed to increasing obesity and deteriorating heart health. About 42 percent of all adults in the United States are considered obese, and almost half have high blood pressure, according to the CDC. About eleven percent have diabetes, 38 percent have elevated blood sugar levels.
Health officials and doctors say more than 80 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths in the United States are preventable. Above all, the improvement and strengthening of heart health should be worked on long before pregnancy. “Heart health in pregnancy has deteriorated over the past decade,” said Sadiya Khan, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “The time before pregnancy is the right time to prepare for it in terms of health.”
Mainly affected blacks
Black women are most affected. Their death rate is 2.6 times that of white women. Blacks make up around 14 percent of the total US population, data from the US Census Bureau shows. The mortality rate among Hispanic mothers has overtaken that of whites in 2021.
Blacks are also more likely to be hospitalized and die than whites, data shows. “It’s sad but not surprising,” said Veronica Gillispie-Bell, a gynecologist and associate professor at Ochsner Health, a New Orleans healthcare facility.
The higher death rates among black women would also reflect inequalities in health care. Healthcare facilities are also more likely to overlook the concerns of black patients, studies show. According to the CDC, economic stability and educational opportunities play a major role in pregnancy-related mortality.
Restrictive laws increase maternal mortality
According to a study by Tulane University, the high maternal mortality rate in the USA can also be explained by significantly more restrictive abortion laws. On the one hand, it is about the increase in illegal abortions and abortions that are possibly carried out by laypersons, and on the other hand, the fact that many women are being forced to remain pregnant due to stricter abortion laws.
Socioeconomic factors also make pregnancy significantly more risky for marginalized groups than for others. What is meant here are primarily black women.
Wyoming bans abortion pills
In the US state of Wyoming, Gov. Mark Gordon recently signed legislation making the prescription and sale of abortion pills illegal. Wyoming became the first state to enact a ban on abortion pills. Violators face fines of up to $9,000. The law is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.
The bill was passed by Wyoming’s Republican-dominated legislature earlier this month. Specifically, it states that it is illegal “to prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell, or use any drug to induce or perform an abortion.”
The law does not affect the morning-after pill or any treatment necessary to protect a woman whose health or life is at risk. Treatments that are necessary if a natural miscarriage should occur are also excluded.
Harsh criticism of ban on abortion pills
“A person’s health, not politics, should drive important medical decisions,” Wyoming American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) director Antonio Serrano said. “This also applies to the decision to have an abortion.”
Wyoming is one of several US states where legal debates about abortion bans have become increasingly vocal. After the US Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade overruled abortion rights, more than a dozen US states have enacted near-total abortion bans. However, several of these were put on hold by the courts.
Also in Texas debate about possible ban on pills
In the US state of Texas, too, federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk recently dealt with a possible ban on the abortion pill mifepristone, which was approved more than 20 years ago.
This was preceded by a lawsuit by the right-wing conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom. This accused the FDA of having approved a “dangerous” drug without adequate testing. Kacsmaryk, who dealt with the lawsuit, was appointed by then-US President Donald Trump and is considered to be arch-conservative.
More than every second abortion with mifepristone
Mifepristone was approved by the FDA in 2000 and is used to terminate pregnancies up to the tenth week. After the abortion of the nation’s fundamental right to abortion, the prescription of the abortion pill increased in the United States.
Pro-choice abortion advocates are now concerned about the Texas trial. The decision could have a huge impact on the lives of many women in the United States. After all, the abortion pill mifepristone is used in around 53 percent of all abortions.
In November last year, abortion opponents went to court to obtain a ban on mifepristone throughout the United States. However, the FDA dismissed the complaint. According to her, the abortion pill has been used by more than 5.6 million women since it was approved in 2000. Only in around 1,500 cases would there have been complications without a connection to mifepristone being established.
