▪️You’ve probably seen headlines and memes like this, claiming a crisis in maternal deaths doubling in the last 20 years. Our World in Data has a recent article debunking this quite convincingly, showing the increase is almost entirely due to changes in reporting.

▪️Decades ago, maternal deaths were primarily counted as those happening during childbirth or shortly after. This undercounted maternal deaths, as certain conditions like heart disease can be exacerbated by pregnancy, and there were instances when it wasn’t checked if a deceased woman was pregnant.

▪️Thus, there was a well-intentioned effort to fix this by instituting a checkbox on the death certificate for women, asking if they were pregnant, or recently pregnant (including up to one year after pregnancy). Not surprisingly, this substantially increased the amount of reported maternal deaths.

▪️Obscuring this increase was the fact that not every state adopted the checklist at once. It was a gradual process, beginning with 4 states in 2003, with all 50 joining by 2017. The aggregate national data appeared to show a steady increase, but was simply the result of more and more states adopting the checkbox.

▪️Looking state by state, the numbers would roughly double right after the checkbox, then plateau. There was no alarming increase in maternal mortality, just a one time blip from change in reporting.

▪️The new method also likely overstates maternal mortality by lumping some unrelated deaths (i.e. drug overdose) as maternal deaths. Audits have also found false positives and errors in box checking which inflated the numbers.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement

▪️It’s unsurprising that the media would cluelessly and uncritically run with these stories, but a bit disturbing that they took the lead from medical publications, which should know better.