Deaths among pregnant women and new mothers rose sharply during pandemic

Pregnant women and new mothers died in sharply increasing numbers during the pandemic, and not just because of a rise in medical complications that may accompany pregnancy and childbirth. An even greater toll was exacted by other causes, including drug overdoses, homicides and car accidents, according to a study published Friday.

“It is really heartbreaking to see,” said Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio and lead author of the paper, published in JAMA Network Open.

“There is definitely a problem in our country for women who are either pregnant or in the postpartum period, who are vulnerable and under a lot of stress,” he added. “We are failing these women as a society and failing their children.”

Maternal health is widely seen as a key indicator of a society’s overall well-being. Even before the pandemic, the United States was the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to have a baby, with the greatest risks concentrated in Black and Native American communities.

The new report highlighted the dangers faced by Native American women, who face the greatest risks during and after pregnancy. Native American women were 3.5 times as likely to die during this critical period, compared with white women.

They were three times as likely to die of a pregnancy complication and nearly four times as likely to die of a cause unrelated to pregnancy. Native American women were five times as likely as a white women to die in car accidents during and after pregnancy, three times as likely to die of drug overdoses or homicide, and four times as likely to die of suicide.

During and after pregnancy, Black women also faced heightened odds of death that were almost double those of white women, along with a risk of dying specifically from pregnancy complications that was 2.8 times that of white women.

They were less likely to die of a drug overdose or suicide during and after pregnancy, compared with white women. But more than any other racial or ethnic group, Black women died as a result of homicide; they were five times more likely to be killed this way than white women.

The scientists identified 2,019 deaths in 2019 and 2,516 deaths in 2020 among women who were either pregnant at the time they died or had been pregnant within the past year.