1/ This morning, for the first time in over a decade, @CDCgov reported the maternal mortality rate from all 50 states

Here's a quick take on why this is so important....

(full report and a webinar linked below) https://twitter.com/NCHStats/status/1222901078368194561

A few years ago, it came to wide public attention that American's today are 50% more likely to die in childbirth than their own mothers-- risks that are consistently higher for native and black Americans than white Americans https://www.propublica.org/series/lost-mothers

Maternal mortality is hard to track and report accurately, particularly because the reasons why someone died are not always readily apparent from a death certificate

About a decade ago our country began a slow, incremental, state-by-state process of addressing this

placing a "pregnancy" check box on the death certificate was a step forward... but in many cases this box was being checked in error and muddying the picture

the new data from the CDC aims to address this using a number of wonky exclusions...this yielded a more conservative estimate of the number of pregnancy-related deaths in our country

importantly, the maternal mortality rate attends to a narrow set of clinical diagnoses and does not include suicide and homicide--

we know however, that pregnant people are particularly vulnerable to exacerbations of life-threatening mental illness and domestic violence

it is very possible that the new CDC estimates are undercounting the ways in which mothers in country are vulnerable to dying of preventable causes

and even using conservative estimates, a disturbing set of trends still hold:
-hundreds of American mothers die each year of preventable pregnancy-related causes
-the risks of dying have increased significantly
-we are much worse at saving the lives of native and black mothers

The full CDC report contains a lot of nuance but this simple headline from @voxdotcom is spot on: