Trends in Maternal Mortality (2000-2020)

This report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights highlights the extreme racial disparity in maternal mortality in the United States, underscoring the impact of the social determinants of health, bias in healthcare, and the federal government's role in addressing these issues. Black women in the U.S. are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women, and Native American and Alaska Native women are more than two times as…

This data portal from Surgo Ventures provides a comprehensive tool using 2021 date to examine the range of factors that influence adverse pregnancy outcomes in the United States, where the maternal mortality rate remains the highest of any industrialized country in the world. The U.S. Maternal Vulnerability Index (MVI) is the first county-level, national-scale tool to rank vulnerability to poor maternal health outcomes and identify the regions and factors impacting susceptibility to these outcomes for…

This article from the Journal of Women's Health provides an expansion of the literature review on the social determinants of maternal health to include the "structural determinants of health" and "root causes of inequalities," with the ultimate goal of exploring racism as a cause of inequities in maternal health outcomes. The authors underscore the importance of the World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, as it was critical to identifying and addressing…