CDC Vastly Overestimated U.S. Maternal Death Rates, Says New Study

Maternal health care has actually improved substantially in many areas.

"U.S. maternal deaths keep rising," reported NPR last year. PBS similarly observed, "U.S. maternal deaths more than doubled over 20 years." CNN also reported, "US maternal death rate rose sharply in 2021, [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] data shows, and experts worry the problem is getting worse."

The increase in maternal deaths is a statistical illusion argues a new study just published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. "Our study, which identified maternal deaths using a definition-based methodology, shows stable rates of maternal mortality in the United States between the 1999–2002 and 2018–2021 periods," conclude the authors. That's wonderful news but what accounts for the headlines that cited a steep rise in maternal deaths?

The researchers note that maternal deaths began to rise in 2003 when a pregnancy check box was added to U.S. death certificates. Consequently, if a woman who was pregnant and died in a car crash, from heart disease, or cancer the box was marked and counted as a maternal death in the CDC's National Vital Statistics System. This statistical misclassification process is what has largely resulted in the reported steep rise in maternal deaths. As the press release accompanying the new study explains:

The CDC method showed maternal death rates of 9.65 per 100,000 live births in the 1999-2002 period and 23.6 in the 2018-2021 period, while the alternative method calculated death rates of 10.2 and 10.4 per 100,000 live births, respectively. These startling statistics discount the previously held belief that the United States maternal death rates have been increasing.

In even better news, the researchers found evidence that health care during pregnancy and after delivery, rather than worsening, has actually improved substantially in many areas. In addition, they found a slight narrowing of differences in maternal death rates by race.

Comments

[Minadin]

CDC delenda est.

[I woke up when Hillary talked about Reconstruction]

Good ole gerunds

[Sometimes a Great Notion]

This statistical misclassification process was used to further their control of healthcare in this country. Can't have a panic without a crisis first.

[Mike Parsons]

It suited a lot of their purposes.

- Lets people complain about the US healthcare system while arguing for more govt control with systems like the NHS. "We spend all this money on healthcare and have the WORST results!"

- Lets the feminists argue that women are facing yet another obstacle in the US

- Lets the doomers and sensationalists have some material so they can scream at their anxiety ridden audiences that "EVERYTHING IS THE WORST AND WE ARE FUCKED!!!"

- Let the race hustlers point to it as "and just imagine how bad it is for the BLACK women!!"

[MrMxyzptlk]

You are not wrong.

[EISTAU Gree-Vance]

“EVERYTHING IS THE WORST AND WE ARE FUCKED!!!”

Not bad. It’s got a nice ring to it. Needs work on the acronym though.

[Mike Parsons]

If I remember correctly this was an often cited statistic for why the US has abysmal healthcare. I believe infant mortality is the other one.

Shouldn't be a surprise to us that the CDC bunged up yet another area.

"In even better news, the researchers found evidence that health care during pregnancy and after delivery, rather than worsening, has actually improved substantially in many areas. In addition, they found a slight narrowing of differences in maternal death rates by race."

Big oof for the doomers and US-healthcare-bad screechers. And really not a great headline grabber for all the commie news networks who want everyone to think the only way forward is to burn it all down and start over.

[LIBertrans]

So is the solution is to put Marjorie Taylor Greene-Teeth in charge of data-vetting and statistical math having anything to do with race-suicide eugenics and replacement theories? And what about the involuntary servitude language in the 13th Amendment? Is it OK to enslave women as long as it's for the altruistic good of the collective, commonwealth or crowd?

[mulched]

Dafuq, Hank? Go back to sleep.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

How about a Comstock Revival?

[B G]

Seems like a fair swap for allowing the "bodily autonomy" crowd to ban vapes, limit beverage sizes, prohibit the use of butter and salt in restaurant cooking (goodbye French cuisine, btw), or to mandate bi-monthly boosters for a vaccine which doesn't do much to slow the spread of a virus which is statistically not a significant danger to people under 50.

As someone who takes a pro-choice stance (at least for pre-viable feti) on an individual sovereignty basis, I genuinely wonder (and have directly asked friends in the past) why there doesn't seem to be a single decision outside of "reproductive freedom" to which the "fundamental right of bodily autonomy" should be deemed applicable.

[Sometimes a Great Notion]

Consequently, if a woman who was pregnant and died in a car crash, from heart disease, or cancer the box was marked and counted as a maternal death in the CDC's National Vital Statistics System.

Let me guess though; abortion didn't get counted. Not that I'm against abortion per se just that the CDC is nothing if not inconsistent.

[Longtobefree]

Died in a car crash:
plus one maternal death
plus one COVID death

End the CDC

[B G]

"Let me guess though; abortion didn’t get counted. "

As a maternal death? As in death of the mother?

While any procedure comes with certain risks, that's not normally the intended result of a properly administered medical abortion. It would likely take a lot of digging to determine how the records were marked for any cases where there were fatal complications resulting from those procedures.

[JesseAz]

Don't know whether to be shocked given CDC died with covid rates. Or be suspicious they are cooking the books to make it appear better like VAERS.

[Mike Parsons]

A doubling in such a short period of time should immediately make people call into question if its legit. Did something substantial happen in that period, because it would have to be very substantial for a doubling. Did other countries double as well? If we were the only one that doubled, there is a good chance its bad data. These are all the thought processes that someone with an agenda skips over.

The goal is to show that "our wasteful, corrupt, for profit healthcare system is not only expensive but also way way worse than all the govt run healthcare, who get much better results than us".

[DesigNate]

Your fetus protects you, my fetus protects me.

Or alternatively:

Died of pregnancy or died with pregnancy.

[MrMxyzptlk]

Garbage in. Garbage out. Nuff said.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Sounds like most human species reproduction.

[JFree]

This statistical misclassification process is what has largely resulted in the reported steep rise in maternal deaths

That shouldn’t be a surprise and as someone says above similar misclassification across different countries re infant/preemie/child/etc mortality makes for bad comparisons as long as one is lazy and superficial (aka CDC, all pols, commenters here, etc - basically everyone except me).

Two things from inside the study were interesting:

the NCHS proposed new guidelines, such as a restriction on the use of the pregnancy checkbox to deaths of pregnant women and people (hereafter abbreviated as “women”) aged 15 to 44 years

In good news, looks like the Journal of ObGyn is less woke than most. No ‘birthing people’ no ‘nonbinary males identifying as pregnant’.

maternal mortality rates in the United States have continued to increase from 17.4 in 2018, to 20.1 in 2019, 23.8 in 2020, and 32.9 per 100,000 live births in 2021

That is a massive increase in 2021 which indicates that
a) averaging those four years as the endpoint of a 20-year time series is more than a bit deceitful. 2021 is clearly outlier data and should be first explained as a possible outlier. And hey presto – 2021 and prob 2020 have one thing that is very different from all the earlier years and it’s not a ‘pregnancy checkbox’. Guess what it is.

b)because those two individual years are at the end of a long time series, any ‘ratio’ data is really likely to be a bit bullshit. Picking beginning and end points that are known to be extreme – when you are focusing on some trend – is – deceitful. Ratios – eg maternity deaths per 100,000 live births – only matter when looking at long time series. Absolute numbers of maternal deaths are far more informative for that 2 year subset of data.

But nowhere else in this study is there any info on those two years. And nowhere else is there any absolute data given except as an average of the four years.

[Mike Parsons]

"pregnant women and people (hereafter abbreviated as “women”)"

Nah, this is already a bridge too far. It accepts the premise that 'pregnant people' are a thing distinct from 'pregnant women'. It gives ground to the post-modern retard thinking that anyone can get pregnant. Even this little pushback, in referring to them as 'women' through the rest of the article is not enough pushback.

The correct stance is to call them women from the start, and tell them to fuck off when they say "but men and nonbinary people can get pregnant too". You dont give shit leftards an inch, because giving them too many inches in the past has led OFFICIAL MEDICAL JOURNALS to have to make a statement as ridiculous as "from here on out, we will be bold and refer to the people that can become pregnant as 'women'"

[Eeyore]

As a man I can get infected with round worm and flat worm. As parasites those are equivalent to the modern thinking about clumps of cells.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

'"U.S. maternal deaths keep rising," reported NPR last year. PBS similarly observed, "U.S. maternal deaths more than doubled over 20 years." CNN also reported, "US maternal death rate rose sharply in 2021, [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] data shows, and experts worry the problem is getting worse."'

Crisis porn is the best porn. Especially for nihilistic Karen progressives. And the overlords who want to control them (and us).

[Mike Parsons]

^reply to EBHS above

“Especially for nihilistic Karen progressives. And the overlords who want to control them (and us).”

Of note, those two have identical goals, as the goal of the former is to get the latter elected to have more control over their political foes and force them to act in accordance with their political beliefs.

[NoVaNick]

Still waiting for them to restate the COVID deaths as people who actually died because of COVID, not just had the virus, but also smoking deaths, where they have been repeating the same 450k deaths per year since the 1970s when 40% of Americans smoked and smoked a lot more than they do today. I’m not gonna hold my breath though-crises sell…

[Stuck in California]

You'll be waiting a long time.

Those data literally don't exist. There's no standardized definition, no standardized reporting, and never was. Reporting was also skewed by perverse incentives, and the data reported were buried or manipulated because of other (political) perverse incentives.

The CDC should be one thing, a data clearing house. They've repeatedly failed at that, or even worse than failed. Probably should just nuke them from orbit, we'd be better off with nothing than The Science™ they put forth.

[NoVaNick]

CDC was created to control malaria and smallpox, which it succeeded at over 50 years ago. Since then, they haven’t really had a purpose so they’ve come up with these non-communicable or lifestyle diseases to justify their existence.

[Stuck in California]

Exactly. Job done. Hang up a Mission Accomplished banner and go home. We don't need you anymore CDC.

That's what happens with every organization that outlives its mandate. It metastasizes to justify its own existence. I swear, every Federal organization (maybe every law) should have an automatic expiration date** and Congress should have to write new legislation to bring it into existence again after that date.

**I was going to say after some explicit criteria have been met, but that would provide a perverse incentive to never quite meet the criteria.

[Eeyore]

It cured the flu and nobody died from the flu for a year. It saved all of those lives.

[AT]

Good. Less BS excuses for abortion.

[I woke up when Hillary talked about Reconstruction]

Yes, get your statistical info and views from William Briggs, PhD
Statistician to the Stars

[AT]

Seems like maybe you want women dying - or at least the threat of it - to preserve your sacrament of abortion. Is that it?

[Yuno Hoo]

The researchers note that maternal deaths began to rise in 2003 when a pregnancy check box was added to U.S. death certificates. Consequently, if a woman who was pregnant and died in a car crash, from heart disease, or cancer the box was marked and counted as a maternal death in the CDC's National Vital Statistics System. This statistical misclassification process is what has largely resulted in the reported steep rise in maternal deaths.

Obviously the solution is to add a dental caries check box to U.S. death certificates.

[Knutsack]

News outlets will have a story about this study, won't they?

[LIBertrans]

Right next to Jewish Space lasers menace MAGAts by Marjorie Greene-Teeth

[creech]

This is misinformation the average person cannot discern on one's own. You need journalists to investigate. Nevertheless, there is misinformation out there: The Labor Dept.'s January inflation numbers reported, according to Assoc. Press, that grocery prices only increased 1% from January 2023. Believe your lying eyes that this is a crock.

[MWAocdoc]

Here's a picture of the CDC Epidemiology crew calculating maternal death rates in their modern new data collection facility in Transylvania, Maryland in 2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing#/media/File:Glen_Beck_and_Betty_Snyder_program_the_ENIAC_in_building_328_at_the_Ballistic_Research_Laboratory.jpg

Shortly after this picture was taken, Joe Biden (D-Sparta) awarded the team the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing "Outstanding Creativity in Fabricating Narratives in Support of a Key Demographic or Marginalized Population."

[Sequel]

When journalists reach precipitously for headlines that trigger racial, gender, or ethnic audiences, Journalism dies.

Reading the daily MSM newspaper or watching TV news can now be converted into a game as one deduces the specific audience that each story was calculated to zap.

There is no excuse for a legitimate journalist to refuse to attempt to verify the authenticity of a story.

[LIBertrans]

Translation: WAAAAAH!

[I woke up when Hillary talked about Reconstruction]

Fauci has not been brought to law (or Biden for that matter) so don't hope too much.

[VinniUSMC]

Died with pregnancy, or died of pregnancy?

[LIBertrans]

Translation: Died of involuntary servitude? or was killed by involuntary servitude enforcement?

[Unable2Reason]

I wonder if they could be wrong about anything else?

[jimc5499]

There's nothing new here. This has been going on for a long time.
Police accident reports have a check box for "Alcohol Related" not "Alcohol Caused". Many Police Department have this box checked by default. Related means that if anybody involved in an accident has any measurable amount of alcohol in their system it is alcohol related. They have been using this to inflate "drunk driving" statistics for years.

[LIBertrans]

“I’m here at this health care clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like,” Harris told reporters from the lobby of the clinic.
Ka-ching!!! Incoming female votes...

[tekcoyote]

When I was in med school (I finished in 1973), the maternal death rate in the US was ~ 1/10,000. The article gives it as jumping from 9.5 to 10.2/100,000. That's between 0.95 and 1.02/10,000. Last year, there were 3.96 million human births in the US. By these numbers, the catastrophic "jump" in deaths was from a total of 376 to 404.

Does anyone reading this seriously think that this was other than a statistical fluctuation?

The rate of anesthetic deaths--go to sleep but don't wake up from anesthesia (not from the surgery, but from the anesthesia) was and remains about 1 in 10,000. Just about the same as being pregnant and/or dying during for right after delivery. Does 1 chance in 10,000 of dying prevent anyone here from doing something?

(And, before you ask, the answer is no: doing it 10,000 times in a row DOESN'T virtually assure you of dying from it. That's not how probability works. That gives you a 63.2% chance of dying from it. Details on request.)

[Sevo]

"...The researchers note that maternal deaths began to rise in 2003 when a pregnancy check box was added to U.S. death certificates. Consequently, if a woman who was pregnant and died in a car crash, from heart disease, or cancer the box was marked and counted as a maternal death in the CDC's National Vital Statistics System...."

And this has gone un-noticed by NPR and CNN, both 'trusted' news outlets, amiright?

[CopaGent]

After the Covid debacle I have no confidence in or respect for the CDC. They failed in every way possible.