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Tag: maternal mortality
Maternal And Infant Mortality Are Highest In 'Pro-Life' Red States

Maternal And Infant Mortality Are Highest In 'Pro-Life' Red States

Valuing life is the official reason for abortion bans, but on measure after measure, the states banning abortion show just how little they really value life.

After Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves claimed that his state’s successful battle to overturn Roe v. Wade was “always about creating a culture of life,” we took a close look at Mississippi: Highest infant mortality rate. Highest homicide rate. Highest firearm mortality rate. Lowest life expectancy at birth.

But it’s not just Mississippi. The New York Times has a look at a range of ways states can support children and mothers, and states that are banning abortion come out worse on just about all of them than do states that are not likely to ban abortion.

Outcomes on which the 24 current or likely abortion ban states are worse than the 20 states unlikely to ban abortion:

  • The infant mortality rate in states banning or expected to soon ban abortion is 6.3 per 1,000 births. In states that aren’t going to ban abortion, it’s 4.7 per 1,000.
  • The maternal mortality rate in the ban states is 25.2 per 1,000, compared with 15 per 1,000 in states that won’t ban abortion.
  • 18.5 percent of children live in poverty in the ban states, compared with 14.8 percent in the no-ban states.
  • 15.7 percent of women of reproductive age are uninsured in the ban states, compared with nine percent in the no-ban states.
  • It’s 7.2 percent to 3.6 percent for uninsured children—that’s double.
  • 8.8 percent of babies in the ban states are born with low birth weights, compared with 7.7 percent in the no-ban states.
  • There are 21.2 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19 in abortion ban states, compared with 12.1 per 1,000 in no-ban states.

Alongside those outcomes are some striking policy differences: Not one of the states banning abortion has paid family leave. Eleven states that won’t be banning abortion have paid family leave. Every single one of the latter has expanded Medicaid, while just 15 of the 24 abortion ban states have done so. All but one of the no-ban states have minimum wages above the federal level of $7.25 an hour, while just eight of the ban states do. Both groups of states include six that have universal pre-K, though that’s a larger percentage of the no-ban states.

None of the state lawmakers who have pushed through and supported abortion bans can seriously claim that their states’ governance reflects a priority on life. The numbers are clear.

Even if every one of these states had 100 percent insurance rates and the lowest infant mortality and maternal mortality in the world, forcing people to carry pregnancies and give birth against their will would be a moral outrage. But there really should be a rule that anytime a lawmaker is quoted opposing abortion, they should be identified with the infant and maternal mortality rates of their states and with any votes they have made to support or oppose things like expanding health care or establishing paid family leave or reducing child poverty.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Anti-Abortion Zealots Move America Toward ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Anti-Abortion Zealots Move America Toward ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

After the election of President Donald J. Trump, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, found a new audience, surging once again to popularity with a reappearance on best-seller lists and adaptations as a television drama and an opera.

The novel is set in a not-too-distant future in which fertile women are enslaved, raped and forced to bear children for the infertile wives of powerful men. Women living under the iron grip of that regime, set in a place that was formerly part of the United States, have no right to their own bodies. The plot presents an uncanny and unsettling projection just a bit further along the path from our own time.

Across the land, in states ruled by right-wing Republicans, women’s reproductive rights are being slashed and burned. Several legislatures have introduced severely restrictive anti-abortion bills designed to end up before the Supreme Court, which conservatives believe is poised to nullify Roe v. Wade.

Earlier this week, Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law one such patently unconstitutional bill. That state became the latest to pass a so-called heartbeat bill, which will ban abortions after about the sixth week of pregnancy, when doctors can often detect a heartbeat from the fetus. That’s so early, however, that many women don’t even know they are pregnant.

Like his fellow right-wingers, Kemp claims that he is protecting the “innocent” and supporting the “right to life.” That’s just nonsense — a travesty revealed by statistics showing a lack of concern not only for children who emerge from the womb but also for the mothers who would care for them. Many of the states rushing to outlaw abortions have miserably high rates of child poverty, child mortality and maternal mortality.

The data rip away the professed concern for the “innocent,” the protestations of protection for children, the claims about the sanctity of life. Trump’s success in packing the courts with ultraconservatives has merely emboldened the misogynists who have long bristled at the progress women have made toward full equality over the last several decades. They want nothing less than to reverse the advance of women’s rights.

Georgia is just one example of that glaring hypocrisy. The United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality — deaths during pregnancy or childbirth or in the weeks just after — in the developed world, and Georgia has the second-highest rate in the U.S., according to USA Today, which conducted an extensive investigation into maternal mortality in this country. More women die in Georgia as a result of childbirth than in many developing countries.

According to the 2018 Health of Women and Children Report, Georgia ranks 34th in child mortality (16th from the bottom). And, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 25 percent of Georgia’s children are poor. Their lives would certainly be healthier if the GOP-controlled Legislature were to expand Medicaid, but it has adamantly refused to do so.

Meanwhile, in Alabama, my native state, ultraconservative Republicans are pushing to pass the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion law, a bill that would outlaw almost all abortions and put doctors at risk of 99 years in prison for performing one. But amid the declarations of protection for children and families, these facts stand out: Alabama ranks 44th (6th from the bottom) in child mortality; it ranks 49th in infant mortality; and 26 percent of its children live in poverty.

And then there’s Mississippi, which passed a so-called heartbeat law earlier this year. It’s one of the worst places in America for a child to grow up, especially if that child is black and poor. It has the nation’s highest rate of infant mortality; it has the second-highest rate of child mortality; and 31 percent of its children are impoverished.

There is no love for children among those clamoring to reverse reproductive rights. There is, instead, a barely concealed contempt for women, a resentment of laws that have given them the freedom to control their own bodies. Little wonder that The Handmaid’s Tale has become eerily relevant.

Is Inequality Killing U.S. Mothers?

Is Inequality Killing U.S. Mothers?

The United States’ embarrassing maternal mortality figures are closely tied to extreme economic inequality, and better understanding of one will help the other.

Imagine that each year six U.S. passenger jets crashed, killing all passengers on board. Imagine that every person who died on those planes was a woman who was pregnant or recently gave birth. Instead of offering interventions and regulations that might prevent more planes from falling from the sky, lawmakers attempted to defund and repeal the very programs meant to improve air safety. That, in a nutshell, is the maternal mortality crisis in the United States.

Today, more U.S. women die in childbirth and from pregnancy-related causes than at almost any point in the last 25 years. The United States is the one of only seven countries in the entire world that has experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past decade (joining the likes of Afghanistan and South Sudan), and mothers in Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia, and Greece (among many other countries) have a better chance of surviving pregnancy than do women in the United States.

It should be no surprise that maternal mortality rates (MMRs) have risen in tandem with poverty rates. The two are inextricably linked. Women living in the lowest-income areas in the United States are twice as likely to suffer maternal death, and states with high rates of poverty have MMRs 77 percent higher than states with fewer residents living below the federal poverty level. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women, and in some U.S. cities the MMR among black women is higher than in some sub-Saharan African countries.

New research suggests that one of the many factors driving this crisis might be inequality. We may have just celebrated the dawn of 2015, but in terms of economic inequality it might as well be 1929, the last time the United States experienced such an extraordinary gulf between the rich and the, well, everyone else. Today nearly 1 in 3 blacks and 1 in 4 Hispanics (compared to 1 in 10 whites) live in poverty, and in certain states those percentages are even higher. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the net worth of the poorest Americans has decreased and stagnant wages and increased debt has driven more middle-class families into poverty. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans have enjoyed remarkable gains in wealth and income. Those in the top 1 percent have seen their incomes increase by as much as 200.5 percent over the past 30 years, while those in the bottom 99 percent have seen their incomes grow by only 18.9 percent during that same time.

As the financial well-being of the majority of Americans has eroded, so too has their health. A recent study conducted by Amani Nuru-Jeter from University of California, Berkeley shows that inequality has very different impacts on black and white Americans. The study found that each unit increase in income inequality results in an additional 27 to 37 deaths among African-Americans, and – interestingly – 417 to 480 fewer deaths among white Americans. Nuru-Jeter and her colleagues were surprised to discover the inverse relationship between inequality and death for whites, and suggested that more research is needed to better understand it. “We do know that the proportion of high-income people compared to low-income people is higher for whites than for African-Americans. It’s possible that the protective effects we are seeing represent the net effect of income inequality for high-income whites,” she said.

The research shows us that rising tides might lift some boats, but it sinks others. And it is unclear if the boats of poor whites actually rise, or if it just appears like they rise because of the higher concentration of people benefiting from inequality in white communities compared to black communities.

Either way, we know that the boats of women of color have certainly not been rising in recent years, and these recent findings beg us to ask how inequality is impacting U.S. mothers specifically. After all, we know that women of color have been disproportionately impacted by the economic downturn. Today the poverty rate for black women is 28.6 percent, compared with 10.8 percent for white women. A 2010 study found that the median wealth for single black and Hispanic women was only $100 and $120 respectively, while the median wealth for single white women was just over $41,000. And in the years following the recession black women represented 12.5 percent of all American workers but accounted for more than 42 percent of jobs lost by all women. Black women have an unemployment rate nearly double that of white women.

Given these grim statistics, it should be no surprise that inequality and maternal-related deaths have increased on parallel tracks over the last decade. But while inequality – and its threats to the economy and the wellbeing of average people – has recently gained long overdue attention, maternal mortality remains an invisible health crisis (unless, of course, you live in one of the communities where it’s all too common for women to die from pregnancy). The media rarely talks about it, foundations aren’t collaborating to invest in initiatives to help us understand – let alone improve – the situation, and policy makers aren’t even pretending to care about it. In fact, the Republican-dominated Congress seems eager to trim or prevent the very programs that help mothers have a healthy foundation for pregnancy: food stamps, reproductive health coverage and access, and wage increases, just to name a few.

The Affordable Care Act is providing much-needed health coverage to many poor women for whom it was previously out of reach, and if fully implemented could certainly help stem maternal deaths. But conservative members of Congress are doing their best to make it as ineffective as possible for the people who need it the most. Nearly 60 percent of uninsured black Americans who should qualify for Medicaid live in states that are not participating in Medicaid expansion. And a recent study found that as a result of conservative opposition to expansion, 40 percent of uninsured blacks who should have Medicaid coverage will not get it (compared to 24 percent of uninsured Hispanics and 29 percent of uninsured whites).

Nuru-Jeter’s research shows us that we will need a host of strategies to tackle deaths in the black community, and maternal deaths are certainly no exception. Better understanding how inequality might be driving unnecessary deaths among women of color would better enable us to identify exactly what those strategies should be and how they should be implemented. And perhaps we wouldn’t get all boats to rise immediately, but it just might get them all to float. It’s sad we aren’t even trying to accomplish that much.

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow her on Twitter @dreaflynn.

Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog.

The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Photo: Amnesty International via Flickr