According to a government report released on Wednesday, October 19, COVID-19 drove a dramatic spike in the number of women who died from childbirth or pregnancy complications in the United States last year. This crisis has disproportionately claimed Hispanic and Black women as victims.
The report outlined worrying trends nationwide for pregnant moms and their newborn babies. The report found that pregnancy-related deaths have increased nearly 80 percent since 2018, with COVID being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year.
The percentage of preterm and low birth weight infants rose last year after holding steady for years. In addition, more pregnant or postpartum women are reporting depression symptoms.
Maternal death rate in the U.S. higher than in other developed nations
Karen Tabb Dina, who works as a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told NBC News that they were already in the middle of a crisis with maternal mortality in the U.S. She said this shows that COVID has exacerbated that crisis to rates that they, as a country, are not able to handle.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan group that authored the report, analyzed pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. after Congress mandated them to review maternal health outcomes in the 2020 coronavirus relief bill.
The maternal death rate in the United States is higher than in many other developed nations and has been increasing in the years leading up to the pandemic. COVID has only worsened conditions for pregnant women here in the country.
Women who contract the coronavirus while they are pregnant face elevated health risks. To make matters worse for expecting moms, staffing shortages in clinics and hospitals and COVID-19 restrictions created more hurdles for them to get in-person healthcare.
Stress brought upon by the COVID pandemic has also intensified expecting moms' depression, which is a common condition during pregnancy. Dina said that mental health issues likely contributed to the rise in pregnancy-related deaths.
Maternal death rate grim for Black and Hispanic women
She added that many women who experience anxiety and depression during or after pregnancy struggle to get the care they need. Dina noted that mental health is the most significant complication in pregnancy that they do not understand.
Carolyn Yocom, director of the Government Accountability Office, noted that the biggest spike in deaths happened from July through December last year. She explained that the COVID-19 delta variant infected millions of Americans during that time.
The maternal death rate is bleak for Black women, with pregnancy-related deaths for every 100,000 births climbing from 44 in 2019 to 68.9 last year, according to Axios. White women had maternal death rates of 26.1 last year, a jump from 17.9 recorded in 2019.
Maternal death rates among Hispanics had declined, but they spiked again during the COVID pandemic. It climbed from 12.6 per 100,000 in 2019 to 27.5 in 2021.
