Mar 23, 2015 4 min read

In the 21st century, we think of women dying in childbirth or the immediate aftermath as something that happens in far-off, developing countries, or as something that happened in a past far removed from our own time, where the safety and comfort provided through modern medicine is something we take for granted.

Sure enough, if you walk through cemeteries that are a couple hundred years old, like Washington Cemetery, and see the tombstones of women who died in their 20s or 30s in the 1800s or early 1900s, there’s every likelihood they died in childbirth. It was once a very dangerous proposition.

But we were reminded in a story that appeared in the Monday edition of the Observer-Reporter that maternal mortality remains a concern in the United States that has not disappeared like some hurricane that has gone out to sea.

Staff writer Barbara Miller reported on the work of Dan Lattanzi, a South Hills obstetrician-gynecologist, who is sending used blood-glucose monitors to patients in Guyana. Chances are, the people in this area who used them upgraded to a better model, but these devices are still usable and much-needed in the impoverished South American nation, where access to health care is patchy. The story pointed out that Guyana has a precariously high rate of maternal mortality, with 280 deaths for every 100,000 live births, compared to the United States, where the rate is 21 deaths per 100,000 live births. According to the World Health Organization, Guyana comes in at No. 41 on the list of countries with the worst maternal mortality, the tally being topped by Chad and Somalia.

Where does the United States stand on this list? We’re at No. 136 – a bit better than Saudi Arabia, but worse than Canada, worse than most European nations and worse than even such unlikely outposts as Puerto Rico, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lithuania.

Considering that we are the world’s leading economy and its one undisputed superpower, we should be doing better. But we are not. In fact, a study released last year by the University of Washington found that maternal deaths have increased in America over the last quarter-century, and the United States is the only developed nation to have seen an increase.

Some observers suggested the increase is due to several factors: more accurate reporting; mothers entering pregnancies with heart or neurological conditions that, in an earlier time, would have ended their lives before they reached childbearing age; women becoming pregnant later in life; and women coming to pregnancy with conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure that can be exacerbated by the nine-month haul from conception to delivery.

But a reliable killer in this country is a lack of access to health care, just as it is in Guyana.

T.R. Reid, an author and filmmaker who has explored issues surrounding the availability of health care in this country, told the Huffington Post last May that in all other industrialized democracies, women can readily access medical care that is free or low-cost. In America, on the other hand, there are millions of women who don’t have health insurance of any kind.

“Those women can’t afford the prenatal care that would keep them and their babies healthy after delivery,” Reid explained. “Thousands of times every month in the U.S.A., women show up at an emergency room nine months pregnant … and they’ve never had a prenatal visit. Those are the women and babies we lose after childbirth.”

The United States clearly has the means and the resources to bring down the number of women who die as a result of childbirth. The question is whether we have the will.