07/17/2023
There’s a lot of talk at present about how white racism is killing off black mothers in childbirth.
According to the CDC WONDER database, from 2018-2022, the lowest rates of maternal mortality related to pregnancy per 100,000 were found in
| Race |
Maternal Mortality/100k of total population |
| More than one race | 0.20 |
| Asian | 0.23 |
| White | 0.27 |
| Hispanic | 0.37 |
| Black | 0.96 |
| American Indian | 1.03 |
| Pacific Islander | 1.15 |
Here are rates of pregnancy-related maternal deaths over the last half decade for the total population. These trends are pretty alarming:
| Rate | Chg | |
| 2018 | 0.30 | |
| 2019 | 0.34 | 13% |
| 2020 | 0.39 | 16% |
| 2021 | 0.51 | 30% |
| 2022 | 0.38 | -26% |
Curiously, there was a sizable worsening of 13% from 2018 to 2019 back in The Before Times when most other measures were fairly stable. Then it got even worse, +16% in the COVID/George Floyd year. Then in 2021 it went up 30% over 2020, before dropping 26% in 2022.
I could make up a variety of scientific wild-ass guesses about how the 2020-2022 trends are explained by COVID, lockdowns, vaccines, or by the social tumult. But, even so, what was going on in 2019? Fentanyl? Meth?
Here is 2018-2022 broken out by race:
| Death Rate | % Chg | |||||||
| Asian | Black | White | Hispanic | Asian | Black | White | Hispanic | |
| 2018 | 0.21 | 0.73 | 0.23 | 0.25 | ||||
| 2019 | 0.23 | 0.88 | 0.24 | 0.29 | 9% | 21% | 7% | 16% |
| 2020 | 0.23 | 1.03 | 0.27 | 0.39 | 0% | 17% | 10% | 34% |
| 2021 | 0.26 | 1.24 | 0.35 | 0.56 | 16% | 20% | 29% | 45% |
| 2022 | 0.23 | 0.92 | 0.28 | 0.36 | -13% | -26% | -20% | -36% |
Hispanics were virtually tied with non-Hispanic whites in 2018, but then had a much higher death rate by 2021, but then saw a lot of narrowing in 2022.
The single worst year for black increase in death rate was, puzzlingly, 2019.
Asian figures were less of a rollercoaster.
All in all, these patterns are pretty puzzling.
By the way, these are not such tiny numbers of deaths that’s it’s all just statistical noise:
Data in this table is from time period:Year/Month: 5 categories selected; UCD — ICD-10 113 Cause List: #Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium (O00-O99)
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 973 | 327,167,434 | 0.3 | ||||||||||||||
| 2019 | 1,103 | 328,239,523 | 0.3 | ||||||||||||||
| 2020 | 1,288 | 329,484,123 | 0.4 | ||||||||||||||
| 2021 | 1,687 | 331,893,745 | 0.5 | ||||||||||||||
| 2022 (provisional) | 1,248 | 331,893,745 | 0.4 | ||||||||||||||
| Total | 6,299 | 1,648,678,570 | 0.4 |
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