For years, U.S. news outlets reported alarming data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on maternal mortality; the latest showed 32.9 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, in 2021. That’s double, even triple, the rate in similar wealthy nations.
Researchers who recently reviewed CDC statistics said they found flawed data collection that artificially inflated U.S. death rates.
“We were actually stunned when we saw that, partly because the rates were so low when we did the corrections,” said Rutgers researcher Cande Ananth, a co-author of the report. “Maternal mortality rates in the United States [are] not as bad as has been previously thought.”
Ananth and fellow scientists took a deep dive into how the CDC gathers and compiles the U.S. maternal mortality rate. Their report in this week’s “American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology” highlights some egregious errors, for example related to the deaths of 147 elderly women.
“We have found data where pregnant females aged 85 years who died being attributable to a maternal death,” Ananth said.
They also discovered fatal accidents with pregnant victims that should not have been logged as maternal deaths. And a “pregnancy checkbox” added by the CDC to U.S. death certificates in 2003 has caused confusion. After the researchers weeded out mistakes, their results cut the CDC maternal death rates in half: from 23.5 down to 10.4 per 100,000 live births, from 2018 to 2021.
The revised rates, Ananth said, “are now very comparable and well within range of most of the data that comes from industrialized countries.”
In response, the CDC said it “disagrees with the findings” and accused the report of “a substantial undercount of maternal mortality. That’s because there are maternal deaths occurring that would not otherwise be identified if the death certificate didn’t include a pregnancy checkbox.”
Ananth said that even corrected data still shows deep racial inequities in maternal health care.
