A new study has found that maternal death rates in the United States have likely been strongly exaggerated due to misclassifications of maternal deaths.
The study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, found that the United States’ maternal death rates have been inflated for the past two decades due to data-classification errors.
These errors were apparently due to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s changes in the way that pregnancy was referenced on death certificates, leading to an “overestimation of maternal mortality.”
The maternal death rate has actually remained flat, according to the study. “A definition-based approach, which requires the mention of pregnancy among the multiple causes of death on the death certificate, shows lower, stable maternal mortality rates in the United States and a temporal…
