The Centers for Disease Control reported 22.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the most recent year of complete data. For comparison, the rate is about 8 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom, 5 in Germany, 4 in Canada, and under 3 in the Nordic countries. The US rate has roughly doubled since 2000. We are the only wealthy country where the number has been moving in the wrong direction.
The Commonwealth Fund, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the World Health Organization have all published comparative analyses arriving at essentially the same finding. The Wall Street Journal ran a long feature in March on rural maternity wards closing across the South and Midwest. According to the American Hospital Association, more than 200 rural hospitals have shuttered their labor and delivery units since 2019. In some states more than half of all counties have no obstetrician at all. Women in those counties drive 60 to 90 minutes to deliver babies, when nothing goes wrong, and longer when something does. Several recent academic studies, including one from the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, link rural maternity-ward closures directly to higher maternal death rates in those communities.
It is hard to write about this without flinching, because the numbers are a national embarrassment. The United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other country in the world, by a wide margin. We have the best hospitals on earth for treating complicated cancers and rare cardiac conditions, and people fly here from every continent to get that care. And we kill more new mothers, per birth, than France, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and every other peer. A mother in rural Mississippi is at higher risk during childbirth than a mother in urban Romania.
The causes are stacked. Rural hospital closures are part of it. Lack of prenatal care in counties without OBGYN coverage is part of it. Higher rates of chronic conditions, particularly hypertension and obesity, in the population coming into pregnancy are part of it. Insurance churn at the moment of childbirth, where many low-income women lose Medicaid coverage 60 days postpartum, is part of it. None of these factors is mysterious. None of them is unfixable. We have not chosen to fix them.
If we are going to talk about being a pro-family country, and a lot of us do, then this is the test case. The most pro-family thing a country can do is make sure mothers come home from the hospital alive. Right now, in the year 2026, that is not something we are doing as well as our peers, and it is barely being talked about. It should be near the top of the list, in every legislature, in every campaign, in every place where the country decides what it is going to be proud of.