America Already Knows How to Make Childbirth Safer

Years ago, researchers discovered that American women were dying in childbirth at an alarming rate, far higher than in many other Western countries. Black women, they found, were dying at even more elevated rates. Data in hand, they called for change.

“It is earnestly believed that whenever the public realizes the facts it will awake to action,” said a report for the Department of Labor. “The hazards to health and life connected with childbirth have been either ignored or accepted as unavoidable accidents,” it read. “No facts brought out in this study are as striking as the difference in rates from childbirth of the white and colored population of the death-registration area.”

The year was 1917.

Over the next century, deaths in childbirth declined in the United States, largely thanks to advances in care in the 1940s, especially the use of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, as well as blood transfusions and high blood pressure screenings.

Yet more than 100 years after that landmark report, written by Dr. Grace Meigs, Americans are still dying of pregnancy and childbirth-related causes at rates far above many parts of the world. Even as maternal mortality declined globally by a third from 2000 to 2015, deaths rose in the United States. The racial disparity persists as well. Even when Black women have higher incomes, they are more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth than white women are.

The Supreme Court decision overturning abortion rights may lead to still more maternal deaths, by further limiting access to reproductive care in the United States. The concern is particularly acute in states like Mississippi, which have among the highest rates of maternal deaths in the country and have enacted near total bans on abortion.

Research is underway to better understand why the deadly racial disparity persists, and how to close it. But plenty is already known about how to reduce deaths from childbirth and pregnancy in general. Yet the United States seems to have accepted these deaths, failing to widely carry out measures that have been shown to stop them.