What to Know About the Roiling Debate Over U.S. Maternal Mortality Rates

[jmyrlefuller]

https://www.propublica.org/article/what-to-know-maternal-mortality-rates-debate

researchers behind a new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (...) concluded that maternal death rates put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been substantially inflated by misclassified data. Using an alternate way of counting deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth, the study found, U.S. maternal mortality rates would be far lower than have been reported. And they’d be stable, not rising.

Health officials rely on information from death certificates to track maternal deaths. The cause-of-death information in these records has always been prone to error and often is incomplete. In the case of maternal deaths, death certificates often aren’t filled out by OB-GYNs or anyone trained to recognize a connection to pregnancy or childbirth.

starting in 2003, states began phasing in a revised death certificate that added a checkbox question asking whether the person who died, if female, was pregnant at the time or within a year of death.

After states added the pregnancy checkbox, they often saw their rates of maternal deaths double, experts told ProPublica. This eliminated the undercount, but it also brought so-called false positives: deaths counted as related to pregnancy or childbirth that really weren’t. This was particularly a problem among women over 40.

The CDC highlighted these issues in several reports. In one, it found that 147 decedents over 85 had been identified as pregnant when they died or within the previous year, according to 2013 checkbox data. In another, it analyzed a sample of 2014 and 2016 maternal deaths identified via the checkbox, comparing their death certificates to hospital records; more than half the deaths were potentially false positives, the agency concluded.

(excerpt)

[jmyrlefuller]

TL;DR version: the CDC has basically been inflating birth mortality rates for decades, we're not appreciably higher than most other developed countries and the rate is pretty much steady, not rising.

[LMAO]

I had a similar debate with a liberal several years ago who pointed out how terrible it is that we have a higher infant mortality rate than many other countries

I pointed out to that person that there’s no uniform standard of counting amongst nations what qualifies as infant mortality. That would skew the data

[PeteS in CA]

starting in 2003, states began phasing in a revised death certificate that added a checkbox question asking whether the person who died, if female, was pregnant at the time or within a year of death.

After states added the pregnancy checkbox, they often saw their rates of maternal deaths double, experts told ProPublica. This eliminated the undercount, but it also brought so-called false positives: deaths counted as related to pregnancy or childbirth that really weren’t. ...

What moron at the CDC didn't realize that what I highlighted would inflate "Maternal Mortality" rates by including deaths due to unrelated diseases, car and other types of accidents, GSW, drug overdose, ...? A reasonably attentive 10YO could figure that out!