Homicide is not the leading cause of death for pregnant women

On occasion, I hear something from someone I agree with that’s so disconnected from my understanding of consensus reality that I’m immediately skeptical.

Today I want to talk about the claim that more pregnant women die by homicide than by any other means.

It’s a claim I’ve seen many times. Usually, other feminists are sharing this stat. Every time, I think, really? That doesn’t seem right.

Homicide is a really uncommon way to die in the US in 2025. The average American is more than 26 times more likely to die as a result of heart disease than homicide.

I guess it’s possible that pregnancy raises the risk of dying by homicide by even more than that. But I’ve never heard that it does. And I do know that pregnancy raises the risk of having a heart attack. So for that claim to be even plausible, pregnancy would need to raise the risk of homicide by many, many more times than it already raises the risk of heart-related deaths, along with every other potential cause of death that we know becomes more likely during pregnancy.

I just could not believe that homicide is more common among pregnant women than deadly blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and accidents.

I’ve even tried to track down the source of this claim, to no avail. Everything changed when I read this story in The Cut.

“Homicide — driven by guns and intimate-partner violence — is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, especially for young mothers,” wrote Moa Short.

Finally, a link to an actual source! Well, kind of. Short actually linked to a NYT article.

I read it and, weirdly enough, the article actually contradicted Short’s claim with this chart:

That could have been the end of things. Luckily for me, the article included this sentence, which links to an actual study: “But homicide isn’t a rare anomaly for pregnant and postpartum women — it’s one of their leading causes of death.”

The 2021 study linked to from the NYT article is, as far as I can surmise, the main source for the misconception. At least it’s the main one besides “I read it once somewhere” and “I made it up.”

The paper’s abstract begins with this sentence: “The leading causes of pregnancy-associated deaths, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are homicide, suicide, and drug overdose.”

A reasonable person, having read that sentence and then moved along, would conclude that homicide kills more pregnant people than heart attacks.

But I am not a reasonable person, nor did I move along. I kept reading until I learned that this study divides deaths during or shortly after pregnancy into two categories: pregnancy-related deaths and pregnancy-associated deaths.

A pregnancy-related death is defined as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 1 year of the end of a pregnancy—regardless of the outcome, duration, or site of the pregnancy—from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.” In contrast, a pregnancy-associated death is a maternal death that is attributable to a condition that is unaffected by the pregnancy and occurs within 1 year of the pregnancy.

“Pregnancy-related” means causes of death that are medically associated with or tied to pregnancy. We’re talking about the heart attacks, strokes, and other medical conditions that we know are more common among pregnant people.

Multiple studies show that pregnant people’s own bodies are much more likely than other people to kill them. Like every other human on earth, a pregnant woman is much more likely to die from health problems than homicide. The leading causes of death for pregnant people include cardiovascular conditions, infections, and hemorrhaging:

source

However, once you take out every cause of death that is in any way directly tied to pregnancy, you have “pregnancy-associated deaths.” These are, and I cannot stress this enough, far less common than “pregnancy-related deaths.”

Pregnancy-associated causes of death include drug overdoses, suicides, homicides, and deaths related to cancer. Even among pregnancy-associated causes of death, not every study shows homicide as number-one.

The 2019 study authors pointed to data showing suicides and drug overdoses were more common causes of death among pregnant people than homicides.

I have three things to say about this. The first two have to do with media literacy. The third has to do with J.D. Vance and the Republican Party.

My number-one takeaway from this situation is this: If it’s in the news, it’s probably rare.

“Man bites dog” is a journalism canard. It refers to the fact that it’s not “a story” when normal stuff happens normally. You don’t write about dogs biting men because that happens every day. No one cares. But when a man bites a dog, that’s unusual. That’s a story.

A homicide is much more likely to make the news than a fatal heart attack because it’s a 26 times rarer way to die. But even homicides are normal enough to require something else unusual to actually make news. The victim, perpetrator, circumstances, or all three need to be surprising or unusual in some way in order to garner coverage.

Similarly, corporations currently own less than .1% of total US housing stock. Corporations don’t usually buy up single-family homes to rent them out for profit. This is a rare occurrence. That’s why it’s news.

If you read that some phenomenon is “growing,” “trending,” or “increasing,” assume that means from zero instances to one or two. Do not assume whatever is being discussed – whether it’s Satanic ritual child sacrifices, “lipstick parties,” or Boeing plane crashes – is becoming common or normal. It may. Boeing sure seems to be shitting the bed. But deadly passenger plane crashes are still extremely, exceedingly rare. That’s. Why. They’re. Still. News. Generally speaking, you don’t need to start worrying about anything until long after you stop reading about it in the news.

The second takeaway is that most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we don’t know.

But I do know one thing. I’m in an echo chamber. And you probably are too.

The vast majority of my reading and listening exists firmly in the center-left/moderate Democrat/liberal ecosystem.

I try to expand my world all the way out to left-populist and center-right thinkfluencers. I tried to like Breaking Points, for example. I sometimes listen to the Realignment Podcast (not very often). I subscribe to The Bulwark (their immigration coverage has been very good).

My media diet and social media ecosystems mean that every day I passively ingest a steady stream of people shitting on the right and far left for their misdeeds. I see their lies, misrepresentations, batshit ideas, etc. I rarely see people outside my echo chamber taking my fellow center-lefties, moderate Democrats, and liberals to task for our crimes.

I try to remember this and use it to maintain a minimum level of skepticism about everything I learn from the people with whom I broadly agree.

I’ll never forget watching one particular segment on This Week with John Oliver. It was, unfortunately for both of us, on a topic about which I already knew something. I walked away pissed off. The segment was so one-sided that a person going in fresh would leave, in a very real sense, worse-informed than before. They’d have false confidence about their level of knowledge on the subject, having no idea that there existed a set of facts and interpretations that were equally true and valid but directly contradicted at least one of the segment’s main conclusions.

So I try to keep this segment in mind as I learn new things. It’s almost always entirely possible that there exists an equally valid set of facts and analyses that directly contradict whatever facts and conclusions I’m currently imbibing.

My third point is that we really don’t know shit about maternal mortality. We don’t know how common it is. Most states do not record or report how many people who died in a given year were pregnant at the time. We can be very confident that medical issues kill more pregnant people than other people do. However, we still don’t know whether deadly hemorrhages or heart attacks are more common. Nor do we know whether the average pregnant person in the US who doesn’t die from a pregnancy-related health problem is more likely to suffer a homicide, suicide, or fatal drug overdose.

We do know that a large percentage of maternal deaths are preventable. This study says 60%. I don’t know if it’s really that high. But even half that is fucking farcical. We do know that rural hospitals are closing and the hospitals that stay open are increasingly closing their obstetrics wings. We know one reason for this is that Medicaid reimburses providers for gynecological and obstetrics care at significantly lower rates than care that’s not specific to women. We know care deserts force pregnant people to drive hours to see their doctors and give birth. We know low-income pregnant people often don’t have cars or gas to make those drives. We know that areas that are too rural to support local hospitals usually also lack robust mass transit.

J.D. Vance just said he “wants more babies in America.” Cool, man. Well then I’m sure you and the rest of the pro-natalist right are funding programs to accurately track the causes of maternal mortality so that we can address them. Because dead moms don’t make babies. I’m sure you’re making sure rural hospitals stay open and maintain their obstetrics practices. I’m sure you’re making sure Medicaid reimburses providers adequately for safely delivering babies. No? You’re not doing any of that at all? Huh. Weird.

Homicide is not the leading cause of death for pregnant women. Poor health is. That’s never going to make the news because it’s boring and expected. But you should know it. Because the next time someone tells you we need more babies, I want you to ask them what they’re doing to make sure more moms survive their pregnancies. Their answer should tell you everything you need to know.