Maternal Mortality Rate Doubles In Texas, Highest in Developed World

"Breaking News! : Fat people don't live long. More at 11. "

All the information is out there. Fat activists hate it so much they print up and sell cards for counter arguments when your doctors suggests you lose weight. Telling someone to eat less doesn't require a clinic visit.

 

About obesity: remember that the article is pondering a doubling of rates in two years. Unless you think obesity in Texas doubled over two years. . . .

 

Uh, what are you talking about? Please share.

 

The rate had been climbing, but fell in 2010, their base year, then shot way up in 2011, before the funding cuts would have likely been a problem. Meanwhile, infant mortality rate has decreased. The real explosion in MMR occurred prior to the law being passed when it had tripled in the past decade.

http://dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/vs14/t05.aspx

 

The sample size seems way too low/insignificant to me, 148 in 2012 vs. 72 in 2010 can be completely random with such a small number of cases. If you have let's say 60-80 deaths for 20 years in a row and then 130-150 following for a decade or longer, it might be valid somehow, although a number within the high double digits/low hundreds still isn't reliable for a true conclusion.

 

That's not the sample size - the sample size would be the number of births in texas each year. The results are statistically significant. They do medical trials with less people anyway.

 

I know the deaths are not the sample size, I'm talking about the results/outcome within the sample. A difference between 148 and 72, which are extremely low numbers digit-wise, and only two years compared isn't reliable data when it completely fails to provide context or a larger time period.

PS: I looked it up and apparently the article in OP is extremely biased and misleading journalism.

http://townhall.com/columnists/ryan...epic-defunding-of-planned-parenthood-n2210048

You can find the data for each year in the link below, but I can't access the site right now:

http://dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/vs14/t05.aspx

 

It hasn't had a sharp rise from 2010 to the present. That is incredibly misleading and why the article is very biased. It is on the trend it has been on.

I agree the state chart needs more information

Could de-funding PP be a partial cause for the continual climb? Sure. Is that the root of the problem? Probably not given the data prior to the move by the legislature.

 

Yeah, it's got to be obesity...

The Story Behind the Maternal Mortality Rate in Texas Is Even Sadder Than We Realize
By Katha Pollitt

Texans like to boast that their state is oversized on everything from job creation to cowboy hats, but its latest big news is nothing to be proud of. According to a just-released report from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, maternal mortality doubled in the state from 2011 to 2014. Unbelievably, Texas now has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. The United States as a whole is pretty shameful on that score, to be sure, with a rate that places it between Qatar and Bahrain. Moreover, the national rate has been rising in recent years—California is the only state that has managed to significantly lower maternal mortality. Even so, Texas is way out of line. What gives?

Opinion writers have been quick to point the finger at the state’s assault on birth control and abortion. In 2013, Texas passed stringent regulations that forced half of the state’s abortion clinics to close. Previously, in 2011, Texas had pursued its jihad against abortion by slashing its family-planning budget (which includes care for pregnant and postpartum women) by two-thirds in order to defund Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that its network of clinics was the single largest provider of reproductive-health care for low-income women. At least 53 clinics—many of them not affiliated with Planned Parenthood—closed; others scaled back their hours and services. What remained of the family-planning budget went to general-purpose community clinics and other health-care providers who struggled to fill the gap. As a result, fewer women were able to access long-acting contraception, and more women had unplanned or unwanted pregnancies—including women already in poor health, for whom pregnancy was not advisable. More women couldn’t obtain an abortion, lacked an entry point into prenatal care, or started that care later.

Even the state’s mammoth loss in the Supreme Court, which overturned its severe restrictions on abortion, has had little effect.

It’s certainly ironic that Texas legislators claimed to be closing clinics to protect women’s health while ignoring the real public-health crisis of mounting maternal mortality. But the full story is more complex—and even sadder. “The closure of abortion clinics isn’t related to this reported increase in maternal mortality, which predated it by two years,” said Daniel Grossman, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, when we discussed the issue. He’s also the director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health and an investigator for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. “The family-planning cuts may have been a contributing factor,” Grossman continued—a second study, released in July by the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force and Department of State Health Services, suggests that they were—“but there had to be something else going on.” One is the opioid epidemic: Overdosing is the second-biggest cause of maternal mortality in Texas. Another is racism: In Texas, the maternal-mortality rate for white women is in step with their pregnancy rate; for Hispanic women, it’s actually lower. But black women are 11.4 percent of all pregnant women in the state and a whopping 29 percent of those who die.

Before I started working on this column, I pictured maternal mortality as death during pregnancy or childbirth. In fact, the statistics include every form of death except non-pregnancy-related cancer and accidents for up to a year after the pregnancy’s end. (This would include deaths from abortion, but despite the concerns of Texas politicians, there seem to have been none of these.) Most Texas women who died post-pregnancy didn’t do so in the delivery room, but six weeks or more after childbirth. The three top causes: cardiac events, drug overdoses, and hypertension.

Some of the women who died may have gotten pregnant because their family-planning clinic closed, and a few may have died because they stayed pregnant when denied access to an abortion. But as all the experts I interviewed stressed, we don’t know enough to state that for sure. We do know that most of them died because they were low-income women who lacked good medical care. A lot of them were on Medicaid—and in Texas, that means extreme poverty: Texas is one of 19 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. If the women were eligible for the state’s emergency Medicaid program, their coverage ended 60 days after the birth. Help with drug abuse is scarce, as is mental-health care (suicide was the seventh leading cause of maternal mortality). “Women need pre-conception care and continuity of care,” said Katrina Anderson, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “What they get is the opposite.”

Joe Potter, principal investigator at the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, said that while we don’t have enough data to explain the deaths yet, “the report is a wake-up call. Cutting the budget to grind these clinics to a close did considerable damage to the women’s health-care safety net.”

So is Texas woke now? Hardly. Even its mammoth loss in the Supreme Court, which overturned the state’s severe restrictions on abortion access, seems to have had little effect. Texas has just given $1.6 million in women’s health-care funding to Carol Everett, an anti-abortion activist who runs a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers.” Neither Everett nor her organization, the Heidi Group, has any experience providing medical services. Media Matters has compiled a long list of her wacky views, including that abortions are frequently performed on women who are not pregnant; that the disposal of fetal tissue could spread HIV or Ebola through the air or water supply; that abortion clinics routinely give women defective birth control to create more business; and that emergency contraception is “destructive to a woman’s reproductive system” and “a social experiment on children.”

As I write, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission is poised to pass a rule requiring women seeking abortion or who have a miscarriage to arrange for the burial or cremation of their fetus, no matter how early the termination. What’s a little maternal mortality compared to keeping Ebola out of the water supply?

 

^ nope, it doesn't have to be obesity... clearly, they still don't know much about what causes the jump. Article is too lacking. But I think it's safe to said you don't double the rate in a very short period of time without introducing something into the system... I wouldn't rule out changes in medication and changes in procedures and practices... in fact, i would focus on looking carefully at all changes and see if they play any significant part. I also would also re-analyze the data of past and current to see if they are accurate.

 

This isn't about racism. This is about poor health related policies (at the federal level and the state level) that coincide with a very obese population.

 

Y'all do realize I was being sarcastic about obesity having anything to do with this rise in mortality rates, right?

 

For all you who viciously attacked me without warrant:



You data-illiterates.

 

Good to know that data error explain a big part of this. A few of us thought that as a possibility.
I don’t recall you being one that questioned the data.

 

That chart! Why is CA an exception. The nation need to do better. This also should put to rest that we have one of the best care in the world. Far from it, when something as common as giving birth is this bad relative to other developed nation.




# of maternal deaths per 100k births:




One exception in the U.S.: California, where safety experts and hospitals worked together to implement practices that are now endorsed by leading medical societies as the gold standard of care. Statewide, California’s maternal death rate has fallen by half, while deaths rose across most of the country.

 

In the entire country, i wonder if women are having their first child at a later age.