If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?
A woman in Texas is about 10 times as likely to die from pregnancy as one in Spain or Sweden,
and by all accounts, the health care plans proposed so far by Republicans would make maternal mortality even worse in Texas and across America.
The U. S. failure on maternal mortality is particularly striking
because around the world, maternal mortality has plunged by almost half since 1990; the U. S. is a rare country in which maternal deaths have become more common in recent years.
An American woman is about five times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a British woman — partly
because Britain makes a determined effort to save mothers’ lives, and we don’t.
Women die unnecessarily in Texas for many reasons, but it doesn’t help
that some women’s health clinics have closed and that access to Medicaid is difficult.
Saving lives also requires better prenatal care, yet more than a third of women in Texas don’t have a single prenatal visit in the first trimester.
Here in Texas, women die from pregnancy at a rate almost unrivaled in the industrialized world.
