CDC sharply overestimates maternal death rate, new study finds
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
But then end with this nugget, using their alternative method:
> while Black women had the highest, 23.8 per 100,000 live births in 2018-2021
So more than double the national average.
> So more than double the national average.
For what it's worth, the current-official CDC figures also state that Black maternal mortality rate is about 2.6 times the maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic white. So both methods show a racial disparity of a similar magnitude.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-020-00691-4
Black women are significantly more likely to be obese: “In 2018, African American women were 50 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic white women.”
https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/obesity-and-african-americans
"38% of direct obstetrical deaths and 87% of indirect obstetrical deaths in 2018–2021 were identified because of a positive pregnancy checkbox. The pregnancy checkbox was associated with increases in less specific and incidental causes of death. For example, maternal deaths with malignant neoplasms listed as a multiple cause of death increased 46-fold from 0.03 in 1999–2002 to 1.42 per 100,000 live births in 2018–2021. Under the alternative formulation, the maternal mortality rate was 10.2 in 1999–2002 and 10.4 per 100,000 live births in 2018–2021; deaths from direct obstetrical causes decreased from 7.05 to 5.82 per 100,000 live births. Deaths due to preeclampsia, eclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage, puerperal sepsis, venous complications, and embolism decreased, whereas deaths due to adherent placenta, renal and unspecified causes, cardiomyopathy, and preexisting hypertension increased.
...The high and rising rates of maternal mortality in the United States are a consequence of changes in maternal mortality surveillance, with reliance on the pregnancy checkbox leading to an increase in misclassified maternal deaths."
It has been interesting watching these stats circulate for years with no mention of how obviously maternal deaths did not skyrocket over a few years totally coincidentally and unrelated to big reporting changes. There's a large appetite for such statistics, particularly ones which show the EU to be better than the USA.
Read this article the other day and has some breakdowns to show how many of those maternal deaths are for things not directly related to pregnancy issues (like embolism or eclampsia).
https://reviewtoaction.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/2014-...
The article doesn't mention drug overdoses specifically, though it does mention cancer as a common cause not related to pregnancy that is increasing maternal death rates.
Ironically, drug overdoses are themselves subject to this same issue: many of the officially-reported stats for both hospitalizations and deaths due to drugs use a method that is essentially equivalent to "did this person report having taken a substance" (or "were traces of a substance detected"), regardless of the amount taken or the cause of death, which means that those are overestimated as well.