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