New Study Pours Cold Water on the Media’s Maternal-Mortality Hyperventilating Brittany Bernstein
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we compare the results of a recent study on maternal mortality with the available media reporting on the topic, look at an absurd headline from The Independent, and cover more media misses.
New Study Upends Prevailing Narratives on U.S. Maternal Mortality
Dr. Ingrid Skop, an ob-gyn and vice president and director of medical affairs for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, regularly has women in her office who have read news reports on the so-called maternal health-care crisis in the U.S., which is said to have the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income country.
“What I tell [them] is that we have had troubles with our data, and we’ve put some systems in place that have helped to detect more deaths. When it looks like the rates are rising, it is probably because we are doing a better job of detecting as opposed to actually having more deaths,” she said, adding “the good news is the death that you’re worried about, a catastrophic event at the time of birth, those rates are improving dramatically.”
“You do not need to be afraid of childbirth,” she said.
So she wasn’t surprised by a new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology last month that found the national U.S. maternal mortality rate is much lower than has been reported by the CDC, which has reported a rate of 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births.
The new study instead finds a rate of 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births and also shows a rate that remained largely stable between 1999 and 2021.
The lead author of the study, physician and epidemiologist K. S. Joseph, notes that the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System is “overestimating rates and that’s because of the pregnancy checkbox,” but acknowledges that “assessing the actual maternal mortality rate is not a simple issue.”
The researchers analyzed the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics analysis of data and eliminated the deaths with only the pregnancy checkbox ticked.
“We would only consider deaths to be a maternal death if there was a pregnancy-related cause mentioned by the physician who was certifying the death,” Joseph said. “There are several lines in the certificate where a pregnancy-related cause can be mentioned, and if any of those lines mentioned a pregnancy-related cause, we would call it that.”
The CDC, meanwhile, said in a statement that it “disagrees with the findings” and said the researchers’ methods “are known to produce a substantial undercount of maternal mortality.”
Dr. Susan Bane, a board member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told NR that the counting essentially went from missing many pregnancy-related deaths to then “including women whose death had nothing to do with their pregnancy.”
“Maybe they died in a car accident. Maybe they had cancer, and it was the diagnosis before they were even pregnant, but they died at some point after their pregnancy. It could have been years, but it still got checked,” she said of the pregnancy box on the death certificate.
There were even a number of cases in which women who were well beyond menopause had the pregnancy checkbox ticked off, “probably because the person checking it misunderstood and thought if she’s ever been pregnant I’m supposed to check that perhaps.”
“That is a major limitation in it. I actually was not surprised at all when I saw this study because I knew that we had so many errors in our reporting system,” she added.
Another shortcoming in the data is that the denominator of the mortality rate consists only of live births; it does not include pregnancies that end in natural losses or induced abortion. Only 60 percent of pregnancies end in live births, Bane noted.
“For example, if 50 women died per 100,000 live births, that would be a maternal mortality rate of 0.05 percent. If the same number of 50 died, but we included 200,000 women instead of 100,000 because we looked at all pregnancies, we would cut the rate in half to 0.025 [percent] simply because we included all women,” she said.
Skop, meanwhile, said incomplete data has been “leveraged by people with political agendas to publish information that looks frightening to create fear among pregnant women and among the American population.”
“You’ve probably seen that there’s a crisis of maternal mortality in black women,” she said, adding that this has contributed to a “eugenic” push by abortion advocates in which they essentially encourage women to have abortions because their risk of maternal mortality appears to be so high.
Bane notes that while more black women do in fact die during or soon after pregnancy, there are many reasons for this. It cannot be fully blamed on racism; rather, black women tend to have “a lot more of these chronic medical issues.”
“There are a lot of factors, and the media has jumped to some conclusions without doing their homework,” she said.
Examples abound.
In December, the Washington Post reported: “For some Black women, the fear of death shadows the joy of birth.”
One young black woman saw the story of another black woman who died while pregnant and saw a “cautionary tale,” the story explains: “Pregnancy while Black can be fatal.”
“To live in fear as you plan for a joyous event,” the woman told the outlet, “there’s some kind of paradox there.”
“According to public health officials, there is,” the Post writes, before going on to call the U.S. “the deadliest place to give birth among high-income nations.”
Headlines from NPR, Meet the Press and The Week all tout a “maternal mortality crisis” among black women.
PBS reported in August on “what experts are doing to combat the rise in maternal mortality among Black Americans.”
“For too many American women, giving birth can be deadly. The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality among developed nations,” the story reads.
In June, CNN reported that “Black maternal deaths keep rising” and published a feature on the doulas who want to “reverse that grim trend.”
The Guardian says “US maternal deaths have doubled since 1999 with most among Black mothers.”
“Among wealthy nations, the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose,” the piece reads.
And there’s surely more to come, as Thursday marks the start of “Black Maternal Health Week.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Must’ve been a slow news day at The Independent, which this week brings us a compelling report on “how climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers.”
The explanation is simple: A new survey of 80 members of the “trans community” in Jakarta found nearly 93 percent of respondents saw decreased income during the rainy season.
“Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and trans women, who tend to face more stigma and marginalisation than trans men or other LGBTQ+ Indonesians, are also among those hardest hit by extreme weather,” it adds, because “trans women . . . are shut out of the formal economy and survive as buskers and sex workers, occupations that rely on them being able to solicit clients outdoors.”
Media Misses
• USA Today presented an alternate reality last week in a report on President Biden’s recent trip to the site of the Baltimore bridge collapse. In reporting on the president’s speech in which he discussed the deaths of six immigrant workers in the collapse, the newspaper wrote, “Biden, who has clamped down on unauthorized border crossings, steered clear of mentioning the victims’ status in the country, instead focusing on their contribution to their community.” This despite Biden’s having seen a record-breaking number of border crossings since the start of his term.
• ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee was the victim of a “smash and grab” robbery in Oakland, Calif., — but it was the suspects whom she expressed sympathy for. “Smash & grab was NOT what we had on our bingo card . . . that’s for sure. Grateful to be safe, the stuff they stole will be replaced . . . but it makes me sad for the folks that do this. Whatever circumstance gets someone to that choice of crime, I hope you know you stole things that are very meaningful to me too — items my kids made me I travel with etc, passport, my glasses — all of which I’m sure is trashed and the tech is being sold,” she wrote in a post on Instagram alongside a photo of her car that had been broken into.
• Rutgers University professor Maya Mikdashi and University of Illinois professor Nadine Naber spoke at an event last month where they found a new response to those who tell pro-Palestinian LGBT activists that Palestine would not treat them with the same respect. The pair claimed that to point this out is actually an act of “homophobic violence.” “So I’ve been at protests where I’m then told, ‘Don’t you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine.’ And we have to start naming this, actually, as homophobic,” Mikdashi said. “You cannot rehearse violence to queer people and be like, ‘don’t you know . . . A, B, you would be . . .’ in really excruciating detail. I think we have to actually shift it.”
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