by Françoise Girard
It’s a shocking and tragic statistic. Women in the United States die from pregnancy-related causes at a higher rate than women in any other wealthy country. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2023, the maternal mortality ratio was 2 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in Australia, 3 per 100,00 in Spain, 5 per 100,000 in Greece, 8 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom and 17 per 100,000 in the U.S. That amounted to 610 pregnant women dying in 2023 in the USA.
According to KFF, one in five (20%) of these U.S. deaths occur during pregnancy, nearly one quarter (23%) occur during labor or within the first week postpartum, and more than half (57%) occur one week to one year postpartum, underscoring the importance of access to health care beyond the period of pregnancy. Recent data show that more than eight out of ten (87%) pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable.
For Black women in the U.S., this picture is significantly worse: “While all U.S. women have experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past two decades, the rate among Black women has increased most precipitously. Today, Black women are roughly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, regardless of their economic or educational status,” according to the Washington, DC-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).
SOURCE: Feminism Makes Us Smarter (FMUS). Edited by Françoise Girard, 31 March 2026. https://www.fmus.org/