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Mom for Gliberty's avatar

I think this particular stat is a bit more complicated. This area has a lot of inconsistent studies and definitions and categories. Like "heart disease" grouped together is a much higher percent of deaths than separates out as myocardial infarction, cardiomyopath, etc.

There is also this study that shows homicide as the number one cause of death. There are some problems I see with it, notably they don't look at suicide and overdose at all and they calculate their rate by 100,000 live births, which would overstate it since some of the deaths likely resulted in fetal demise as well.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9134264/#T2

The study also gets into the addition of the pregnancy check box on death certificates, which was added in 2018, and probably accounts for the difference between your linked study and the numbers here, which are post '18.

This box is the source of a lot of pregnancy misinformation! Anytime you see "maternal mortality exploded in X state" it's because they added this question to death certificates and suddenly women 6 weeks pregnant who were murdered (or hit by a car) started showing up in the stats when the pregnancy would not have been relevant and may not have been widely known about before then. "The box" almost certainly overstates pregnancy related mortality for the same reason, so there is reason to use caution when relying on it for accuracy. Also worth noting that pregnant women are usually young and heart disease is ranked much lower on the death causes for young women.

Also of note, when I used Google to look for that study, the AI result was just straight up "Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in the United States" which is almost certainly not true by any definition: even my linked study doesn't include car accidents or mental health related deaths.

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