There’s a lot of talk at present about how white racism is killing off black mothers in childbirth.

According to the CDC WONDER database, from 2018-2022, the lowest rates of maternal mortality related to pregnancy per 100,000 were found in

Race	Maternal Mortality/100k of total population
More than one race	0.20
Asian	0.23
White	0.27
Hispanic	0.37
Black	0.96
American Indian	1.03
Pacific Islander	1.15

As usual involving health statistics, Asian outperform whites, and Hispanics do much better than the other groups with lower average socio-economic status.

 

Here are rates of pregnancy-related maternal deaths over the last half decade for the total population. These trends are pretty alarming:

	Rate	Chg
2018	0.30
2019	0.34	13%
2020	0.39	16%
2021	0.51	30%
2022	0.38	-26%

Curiously, there was a sizable worsening of 13% from 2018 to 2019 back in The Before Times when most other measures were fairly stable. Then it got even worse, +16% in the covid/George Floyd year. Then in 2021 it went up 30% over 2020, before dropping 26% in 2022.

I could make up a variety of scientific wild-ass guesses about how the 2020-2022 trends are explained by covid, lockdowns, vaccines, or by the social tumult. But, even so, what was going on in 2019? Fentanyl? Meth?

Here is 2018-2022 broken out by race:

	Death Rate				% Chg
	Asian	Black	White	Hispanic	Asian	Black	White	Hispanic
2018	0.21	0.73	0.23	0.25
2019	0.23	0.88	0.24	0.29	9%	21%	7%	16%
2020	0.23	1.03	0.27	0.39	0%	17%	10%	34%
2021	0.26	1.24	0.35	0.56	16%	20%	29%	45%
2022	0.23	0.92	0.28	0.36	-13%	-26%	-20%	-36%

Hispanics were virtually tied with non-Hispanic whites in 2018, but then had a much higher death rate by 2021, but then saw a lot of narrowing in 2022.

The single worst year for black increase in death rate was, puzzlingly, 2019.

Asian figures were less of a rollercoaster.

All in all, these patterns are pretty puzzling.

By the way, these are not such tiny numbers of deaths that’s it’s all just statistical noise:
Data in this table is from time period:Year/Month: 5 categories selected; UCD – ICD-10 113 Cause List: #Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium (O00-O99)

Year	Deaths	Population	Crude Rate Per 100,000
2018	973	327,167,434	0.3
2019	1,103	328,239,523	0.3
2020	1,288	329,484,123	0.4
2021	1,687	331,893,745	0.5
2022 (provisional)	1,248	331,893,745	0.4
Total	6,299	1,648,678,570	0.4