Welcome to Debunker, a weekly breakdown of misleading (and sometimes flat-out wrong!) news from the worlds of science, health, and more—for Beast Inside members only.
Last week on the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Reproductive Health Act, which enshrines Roe’s protections into state law and decriminalizes abortion. Unsurprisingly, the Act enraged conservatives, prompting many to call for Cuomo’s excommunication.
Fox & Friends addressed the controversy Monday morning in a segment featuring Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York. Dolan railed against the Act, claiming that “independent observers” have called it “ghoulish,” “grisly,” and “gruesome.”
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Near the end of the segment, co-host Brian Kilmeade brought up one of the more controversial provisions of the Act, which allows doctors to terminate a pregnancy after 24 weeks if the mother's or fetus’ life is at risk.
“How do you stand, or where does the Catholic Church stand, when the mom’s life is in danger, when it’s medically dangerous for her?” Kilmeade asked Dolan.
“These days, that’s not too frequent,” the Cardinal replied. “These days, there’s so many alternatives that that does not happen.”
That’s just not true. While pregnancy-related deaths are rare, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization shows that approximately 700 women die from pregnancy-related complications in the United States each year.
The U.S. is also one of only two developed nations with a rising maternal mortality rate, according to an infographic published by the National Geographic—and Emily Petersen, the lead of the CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System, told The Daily Beast via email that about 60 percent of our pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.
“Every single one that could have been prevented is a tragedy,” Neel Shah, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, told The Daily Beast. “Every single one. And there’s hundreds.”
While every country struggles with maternal mortality, the United States is having particular trouble. A landmark 2015 Lancet report found that in most developed nations—and even many developing ones—mortality rates dropped sharply in the 1990s.
Not in the U.S. According to CDC data, there were 7.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987; in 2014, the rate was 18 deaths per 100,000 live births.
In other words, it’s riskier for an American woman to have a baby in 2019 than it was for her mother.
“The rate has been rising,” Elliott Main, a professor of maternal fetal medicine at Stanford University, told The Daily Beast. “No matter how you count it, they are more than they should be and more than what they have been.”
In 2017, The New York Times reported that an American woman is five times more likely to die from giving birth than a British woman.
“The U.S. is playing catch-up in a lot of ways in maternal mortality,” Michelle Debbink, a visiting instructor and maternal fetal medicine fellow at the University of Utah, told The Daily Beast. “We’re not even meeting the benchmarks and goals of countries with far fewer resources than we have.” The Archdiocese of New York did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
That’s also true for severe maternal morbidity, defined by the CDC as “unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short- or long-term consequences to a woman’s health.” Petersen said that severe maternal morbidity impacts about 50,000 women each year; 2018 data from the Health Resources and Services Administration claims it’s jumped 75 percent in the last decade.
“Survival is the floor of what women deserve. And we should be aiming for the ceiling,” Shah said. “There’s a huge gap in where we are now and what women and families deserve.”
Experts aren’t quite sure why the U.S. is so far behind other industrialized nations. Some believe that the spike in maternal mortality simply occurred because less pregnancy-related deaths went unreported, citing the fact that the U.S. implemented a “pregnancy-related death” option on death certificates in the early 2000s.
Others have noted that American women are delaying pregnancy until they’re older, and are more likely to be obese than in most other developed nations—all of which increase the likelihood of pregnancy-related complications. And some outlets, including USA Today, have placed blame on hospitals for failing to follow simple safety procedures.
Debbink says that’s not the whole story—and that racism in the health care system is also to blame. That’s borne out in the data: Petersen said that black women are more than three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications (40 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 12.4).
“No matter which way you slice this,” Debbink said, “we have a serious problem with racial inequity in instances of maternal mortality in this country.”
And that’s true regardless of education and income level, Shah said. He referenced the case of Serena Williams, who issued a biting condemnation of racism in the health care system after doctors dismissed her cries for help while she suffered a postnatal pulmonary embolism.
“Even if you’re Serena Williams, and you’re like the world’s greatest athlete, and you’re wealthy and empowered, it doesn’t seem to spare you,” he said.
There is hope. One of the major problems in the system, Debbink said, is a lack of systematic review of maternal mortality cases. But this December, Congress passed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which provides financial support to help states conduct these reviews. There’s already evidence this will work: California, which has been conducting reviews since the mid-2000’s, boasts the lowest maternal mortality rate in the country.
Until California’s success can be spread nationwide, Debbink has a message for conservatives enraged by Cuomo’s act: “It’s just important to remember that those [cases] are very very rare, and that the women who need those services—it’s 100 percent for them. They are facing a true life-threatening event,” she said. “These are women who are facing really terrible odds, and are facing devastating consequences.”
