What We Can Do about Maternal Mortality: And How to Do It Quickly

Abstract

(N Engl J Med. 2018;379:1689–1691) Recent reports in the lay media have discussed increasing maternal mortality in the United States. In fact, women in the United States are more likely to die from childbirth-related or pregnancy-related causes than women in other high-income countries, with black women dying at a rate 3 to 4 times that of white women. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified 3 types of preventable complications: postpartum hemorrhage, severe hypertension, and venous thromboembolism. In this perspective article, the authors discussed 4 actions by which the health care community can reverse this trend of increasing pregnancy-related deaths.