By Austin Frakt, The New York Times, July 13, 2020
According to the best data available, as summarized in a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States could prevent two-thirds of maternal deaths during or within a year of pregnancy.
Policies and practices to do so are well understood; we just haven’t employed them.
A first step is measuring maternal death rates, which is harder than you might think. The death needs to be directly related to the pregnancy or management of it, and confirming this requires careful data collection and assessment. Here’s a straightforward example: A death because of inadequate care during delivery would count as a maternal death, and one because of a car accident after delivery would not.
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