According to a report in Huffington Post by Erin Schumaker, “The pregnancy-related death rate in Texas almost doubled between 2010 and 2012? the same time period that the state severely cut women’s health funding, most notably at Planned Parenthood, according to a new study”.
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The objective of the study was to “develop methods for trend analysis of vital statistics maternal mortality data, taking into account changes in pregnancy question formats over time and between states, and to provide an overview of US maternal mortality trends from 2000 to 2014”, the paper states. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.
“In the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with nearly 400,000 annual births seems unlikely”, wrote the authors, explaining why it’s so disturbing such a fantastic increase in pregnancy-related deaths was reported in the Lone Star State. But after 2010, that rate had leaped to 33 deaths per 100,000, and in 2014 it was 35.8.
In 2012, 148 women in Texas died from pregnancy-related complications, including excessive bleeding, obesity-related heart problems and infection.
No other state saw a comparable increase.
A factor being noticed by the researchers is that the rise in pregnancy-related deaths has come when major budget cuts were made in Texas.
While the rise in maternal deaths in Texas coincided with the state slashing its family planning budget, researchers did not identify that as the cause for the spike.
Indeed, other studies have detailed how politically-motivated attacks on Planned Parenthood are hindering women’s access to quality healthcare in Texas and nationwide.
The latest family planning predicament began in 2011 when the Republican-dominated Legislature decided it was done, once and for all, funding Planned Parenthood. But the healthcare providers who survived the initial cuts reported struggles to restore services to their original levels. The researchers, hailing from the University of Maryland, Boston University’s school of public health and Stanford University’s medical school, called for further study. They point to everything from revisions to Texas’ death certificate to data processing and coding changes to the closing of several women’s health clinics as possible reasons for the jump. The U.S is one of the only countries in the world where the problem of maternal mortality is getting worse, not better. The alarming figure is more concerning because it was during this same period that the funding for women’s health was severely cut in the state, according to the new study. Just this month, Texas’s health department drew fire for allocating $1.6m of the $18m the state budgets for low-income women’s family planning to an anti-abortion group that does not provide basic health services.
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“There is a need to redouble efforts to prevent maternal deaths and improve maternity care for the 4 million USA women giving birth each year”, the authors wrote.
