June 28, 2019
By Suzanne Delbanco, Maclainen Lehan, Thi Montalvo and Jeffrey Levin-Scherz
It’s remarkable (click here) to see the improvements in maternal health around the globe, which have produced a steady decline in the number of women dying from childbirth over the last 30 years. But in the United States, there is rain on the parade. Its maternal-mortality rate has been steadily rising — the only developed country whose is. Given that women with employer-sponsored health insurance account for over half of the annual pregnancies in the United States, employers are in a position to demand higher quality care. In this article, we recommend actions they can take by wielding their purchasing power.
The U.S. maternal mortality rate has more than doubled from 10.3 per 100,000 live births in 1991 to 23.8 in 2014. Over 700 women a year die of complications related to pregnancy each year in the United States, and two-thirds of those deaths are preventable. Fifty thousand women suffer from life-threatening complications of pregnancy. A report from the Commonwealth Fund released in December found American women have the greatest risk of dying from pregnancy complications among 11 high-income countries....
October 13, 2020
The U.S. maternal mortality rate has more than doubled from 10.3 per 100,000 live births in 1991 to 23.8 in 2014. Over 700 women a year die of complications related to pregnancy each year in the United States, and two-thirds of those deaths are preventable. Fifty thousand women suffer from life-threatening complications of pregnancy. A report from the Commonwealth Fund released in December found American women have the greatest risk of dying from pregnancy complications among 11 high-income countries....
The Peters' fetus was going to be aborted eventually when the placenta's protective environment gave way. And after a couple of days, Ms. Peters was very susceptible to infection that would have killed both she and the fetus. Pregnancy is very vascular. The placenta is attached directly to the uterine wall. There is an exchange of fluids through the organ known as the placenta.
The placenta's rupture ended the idea that everything was going well. Mrs. Peters was definitely in danger from this pregnancy and if she became infected the real possibility of contracting a bacterial infection directly into her bloodstream through the placenta would have occurred. She would have been taken over by septic shock and that has a high percentage of death.
I think it was completely negligent of the hospital to enforce an antiquated prohibition of abortion. These are some of the problems with being a woman in the USA, mothers die from pregnancy when women don't have a medical society dedicated to a Mother's life.
The profession that helps bring Americans safely into the world worries about the cost of malpractice insurance. Well. I guess so.
It is time for the physicians and surgeons that practice in maternal/child health in the USA to overhaul their PRACTICE and establish new standards that their European peers see as necessary. There are places of practice that can improve and should be improved, but, the professionals have to address it. Legislators can help when necessary, but, the actual hands-on practice itself has to be reformed from within the specialty itself.
The real path to lower malpractice rates is to actually not need it because of better statistics and better practice with superior patient outcomes. It is time to get real about what is in the OB/GYN toolbox to protect every woman's life.
By Jaclyn Peiser
In the late 1980s, (click here) Sen. Gary Peters’s wife at the time, Heidi, was four months pregnant when her water broke, leaving the baby with no chance of survival. The hospital in Detroit wouldn’t allow Heidi’s doctor to perform an abortion, so the physician told them to go home and wait for a miscarriage.
“The mental anguish someone goes through is intense,” Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview with Elle magazine published on Monday, “trying to have a miscarriage for a child that was wanted.”
But the situation became more critical when Heidi’s health deteriorated, so the couple found a doctor at another hospital who agreed to do the procedure.
In the interview, Peters spoke publicly for the first time about the abortion and the troubling moments leading up to the event, which threatened the life of his ex-wife. Peters joins a small group of members of Congress who have spoken about their personal experiences with abortion....
