THE EPOCH TIMES – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overestimates the number of maternal deaths in the United States due to adding numbers not related to pregnancy into the data, according to a recent study.
The study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on March 12, aimed to assess the causes behind the elevated maternal mortality rates in the United States.
When women die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after delivery from conditions directly related to pregnancy, they are classified as maternal deaths.
By contrast, unrelated deaths are not linked to any of these events. Researchers found that unrelated deaths were being included in the maternal death data, thus inflating mortality rate in this group.
In their analysis, researchers looked at maternal mortality data in two ways.
They first examined maternal death numbers from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is the official maternal death data.
In the second method, researchers restricted maternal death figures to only those cases where pregnancy was listed as a cause of death on death certificates.
According to the first method, the maternal mortality rate jumped from 9.65 per 100,000 live births in 1999-2002 to 23.6 during the 2018-2021 period, which is more than a doubling in the rate. This makes America’s maternal mortality rate substantially higher compared to other developed nations.
Using the second method, the maternal mortality rate was found to have remained relatively unchanged during this period, only rising slightly from 10.2 per 100.000 live births to 10.4. These alternate calculations put America’s maternal deaths in line with its international peers.
The increase in maternal deaths under the official CDC method “were mainly due to deaths from less specific causes,” the study stated. “There was a substantial increase in the misclassification of maternal deaths, including a large increase in deaths with malignancy listed among the multiple causes of death” …
