Latest news with #maternaldeaths
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Maternal deaths rising in UK despite fewer births, official figures show
Growing numbers of women in the UK are dying during pregnancy or soon after giving birth, even though fewer babies are being born, official figures show. While 209 maternal deaths occurred in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during 2015-17, that rose to 254 during 2021-23, data compiled by the House of Commons library shows. The upward trend underlines a recent acknowledgment by the heath secretary, Wes Streeting, that poor care in NHS maternity services is so widespread that it has led to 'the normalisation of deaths of women and babies'. A maternal death is defined as one that occurs while the woman is pregnant or within 42 days of the pregnancy ending, either in the delivery of a child or other event, such as a stillbirth. 'It is appalling that maternity deaths are rising even after the years of concern over the state of services that has led to so many scandals with deadly consequences,' said Jess Brown-Fuller, the Liberal Democrat health spokesperson who commissioned the library's research. 'Families are being torn apart and unimaginable pain is being caused after years of shocking neglect so that now, even with the number of births declining, the number of deaths are rising,' added Brown-Fuller, who speaks for the party on primary care and hospitals. The rate at which such deaths occur is also rising. The 209 deaths during 2015-17 meant that there were 9.16 deathsfor every 100,000 women giving birth. However, the 254 deaths during 2021-23 meant the death rate had by then climbed to 12.67 for every 100,000 births. However, the 2021-23 figures were slightly down on the 275 deaths and 13.56 deaths per 100,000 maternities seen in 2020-22. The two were the highest figures in the eight years the library analysed. Its staff collated the figures from reports by MBRRACE-UK, a longstanding official audit of maternity care quality and outcomes, which is led by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University and involves senior doctors and the Royal College of Nursing. Each of the seven reports they analysed covered a three-year period, with the figures for 2021-23 the most recent available. Streeting last month announced the setting up of an England-wide 'rapid national investigation' into what he called the 'crisis' in maternity and neonatal services. It would 'provide truth and accountability for impacted families and drive urgent improvements to care and safety, addressing systemic problems dating back over 15 years'. The investigation will look into maternity care in up to 10 areas that have prompted particular concern, such as in Leeds – where a scandal is unfolding – and Sussex. It will be undertaken in conjunction with families who have suffered as a result of substandard care of mothers and newborns. Streeting is also chairing a newly created taskforce to ensure that progress is made in tackling what he described in his speech last month as 'the biggest patient safety challenge facing our country'. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Women aged 35 or over are three times more likely to die than those aged 20-24 and black women are at more than double the risk of white women of dying in pregnancy or soon after, MBRRACE-UK has found. In recent years there have been official inquiries into maternity scandals at the Morecambe Bay, East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trusts, and another is continuing into one in Nottingham. In addition, ministers and the NHS have published major strategies in 2016 and 2023 to overhaul care. 'We cannot allow a situation to persist where people are needlessly dying and their loved ones are left to pick up the pieces,' added Brown-Fuller. She blamed the Conservatives for letting maternity services 'decay' while they were in power and challenged Streeting to take immediate 'concrete steps', including ensuring that recommendations from previous reports were acted on. The Commons library research also found that progress on implementation in 11 of the 31 areas in which NHS England promised action in its three-year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services in 2023 has gone backwards. They include staff responding to the woman's concerns during her labour and birth, women receiving kind and compassionate treatment during labour and birth and receiving adequate explanations during their postnatal care. The Department of Health and Social Care did not comment on the rise in maternal deaths. It instead highlighted Streeting's decision to launch the investigation and promise to overhaul the quality and safety of care provided.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite
Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there's no reason to believe it will drop off. Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people. Yet the 21 state legislatures that have imposed total or near-total bans are doing little or nothing to give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress, even if that means inducing abortion. In fact, rather than trying to save lives, they are prosecuting pregnant people who handle those emergencies on their own. The first three – more abortions, more pro-abortion sentiment, more contraception –have frustrated the anti-abortion crowd no end. They know they need stronger disincentives to abortion. Which brings us to the latter two: more punishment and more death. Was punishment the aim all along? And has the anti-abortion movement accepted pregnant people's deaths as an unfortunate consequence of saving the pre-born? According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions rose 1.5% in 2024 from 2023, on top of a 11.1% leap in the first year after Dobbs, compared with 2020, before the near-bans enacted in several states that presaged the ruling. It's also probably an undercount. The statistics include only 'clinician-provided abortions', either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), performed in healthcare facilities or via telemedicine. Guttmacher does not estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system, with drugs obtained directly from suppliers or through feminist underground networks. Indeed, Plan C, the country's biggest clearinghouse for pill access, reports 2m visits to its website and 500,000 click-throughs to resources and care in 2024, a 25% increase from the year before. How many of those people ended their pregnancies at home, with only a friend or lover in attendance? Anecdotal evidence gleaned from activists suggests they number in the tens of thousands. At the same time, rather than making abortion 'unthinkable', as the anti-abortion activists pledge, the bans may be having the opposite effect. An analysis of two restrictive states, Arizona and Wisconsin, and one with broad access, New Jersey, found that negative attitudes toward abortion are down and positive ones up, in both red and blue states. And if the goal of banning abortion is to produce more children, that's not working either. Public health researchers saw 'an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures' – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies). The Trump administration is cheerleading for procreation. 'I want more babies in the United States of America,' declared JD Vance in his first public appearance as vice-president, at the March for Life in Washington. He blamed the declining birth rate on 'a culture of abortion on demand' and the failure 'to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life'. The federal budget extends some of that help. It raises the annual child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 to $2,200. It also creates 'Trump accounts', $1,000 per child, which parents or employers can add to. But only those with social security numbers are eligible for either program; the tax credit is available only to people who earn enough to pay taxes; and as with any investment, those able to sow more in the savings accounts reap more. It's clear what sort of baby the administration wishes to be born: white babies with 'American' parents, and not the poorest. The carrots are not appetizing enough. The stick is not effective enough. So red-state legislators and prosecutors are bringing out the AR-15s. This year, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and, for the first time, criminalizing both the provider and the patient. No such bill has passed – yet – and anti-abortion organizations are usually quick to renounce them publicly, nervous about widespread opposition. But their passage might not be far off. The bills are based on fetal personhood – the concept of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception forward. The idea was introduced in 1884 and finally written into one state's law in 1986. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws. Last year, there were three bills criminalizing the person who has an abortion; now there are 10. And though the federal courts rejected fetal personhood for a century, it is the bedrock of anti-abortion politics, and this US supreme court is looking much more friendly toward it. While they work toward straightforward criminalization of ending one's own pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriage, an event indistinguishable from elective abortion, just in case the pregnant person induced the miscarriage. The most ghoulish is the prohibition on abusing corpses. For instance: last week a 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for 'desecration of human remains', a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for 'concealing the death of another person' and 'abandonment of a dead body' for placing the remains in the bin. A week before that, a Pennsylvania teenager was under investigation for corpse abuse after a self-managed pill abortion and burial of the fetus in her yard. In a grim sense, these are the lucky ones: they survived. Because Dobbs has indisputably been deadly. 'Mothers living in states that banned abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth' as mothers living in states where abortion was legal and accessible, reports the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Maternal mortality rose 56% in Texas after it enacted a six-week ban; a Texan's risk was one and a half times that of a Californian's. The future isn't sunny. A study of 14 total-ban states predicts that in the four years beginning a year after Dobbs, up to 42 mothers will die and as many as 2,700 will be afflicted with 'severe maternal morbidity', defined by the CDC as 'unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term [health] consequences'. In one analysis Black women represented 63% of the deaths. The anti-abortion movement is indefatigable. 'We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,' one leader told Oklahoma Voice. But this is an unattainable grail. Where abortion is illegal, people still have abortions. They just take more risks. Globally, more than 39,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortions. As they run out of options, red-state lawmakers will harden criminal penalties against people who refuse to give up their reproductive self-determination. It may grow less outré to endorse Trump's opinion, expressed in an unguarded moment, that women who get illegal abortions 'deserve some form of punishment'. Whether intentional or not, the sentence for some of those women will be death. Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite
Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there's no reason to believe it will drop off. Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people. Yet the 21 state legislatures that have imposed total or near-total bans are doing little or nothing to give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress, even if that means inducing abortion. In fact, rather than trying to save lives, they are prosecuting pregnant people who handle those emergencies on their own. The first three – more abortions, more pro-abortion sentiment, more contraception –have frustrated the anti-abortion crowd no end. They know they need stronger disincentives to abortion. Which brings us to the latter two: more punishment and more death. Was punishment the aim all along? And has the anti-abortion movement accepted pregnant people's deaths as an unfortunate consequence of saving the pre-born? According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions rose 1.5% in 2024 from 2023, on top of a 11.1% leap in the first year after Dobbs, compared with 2020, before the near-bans enacted in several states that presaged the ruling. It's also probably an undercount. The statistics include only 'clinician-provided abortions', either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), performed in healthcare facilities or via telemedicine. Guttmacher does not estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system, with drugs obtained directly from suppliers or through feminist underground networks. Indeed, Plan C, the country's biggest clearinghouse for pill access, reports 2m visits to its website and 500,000 click-throughs to resources and care in 2024, a 25% increase from the year before. How many of those people ended their pregnancies at home, with only a friend or lover in attendance? Anecdotal evidence gleaned from activists suggests they number in the tens of thousands. At the same time, rather than making abortion 'unthinkable', as the anti-abortion activists pledge, the bans may be having the opposite effect. An analysis of two restrictive states, Arizona and Wisconsin, and one with broad access, New Jersey, found that negative attitudes toward abortion are down and positive ones up, in both red and blue states. And if the goal of banning abortion is to produce more children, that's not working either. Public health researchers saw 'an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures' – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies). The Trump administration is cheerleading for procreation. 'I want more babies in the United States of America,' declared JD Vance in his first public appearance as vice-president, at the March for Life in Washington. He blamed the declining birth rate on 'a culture of abortion on demand' and the failure 'to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life'. The federal budget extends some of that help. It raises the annual child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 to $2,200. It also creates 'Trump accounts', $1,000 per child, which parents or employers can add to. But only those with social security numbers are eligible for either program; the tax credit is available only to people who earn enough to pay taxes; and as with any investment, those able to sow more in the savings accounts reap more. It's clear what sort of baby the administration wishes to be born: white babies with 'American' parents, and not the poorest. The carrots are not appetizing enough. The stick is not effective enough. So red-state legislators and prosecutors are bringing out the AR-15s. This year, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and, for the first time, criminalizing both the provider and the patient. No such bill has passed – yet – and anti-abortion organizations are usually quick to renounce them publicly, nervous about widespread opposition. But their passage might not be far off. The bills are based on fetal personhood – the concept of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception forward. The idea was introduced in 1884 and finally written into one state's law in 1986. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws. Last year, there were three bills criminalizing the person who has an abortion; now there are 10. And though the federal courts rejected fetal personhood for a century, it is the bedrock of anti-abortion politics, and this US supreme court is looking much more friendly toward it. While they work toward straightforward criminalization of ending one's own pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriage, an event indistinguishable from elective abortion, just in case the pregnant person induced the miscarriage. The most ghoulish is the prohibition on abusing corpses. For instance: last week a 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for 'desecration of human remains', a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for 'concealing the death of another person' and 'abandonment of a dead body' for placing the remains in the bin. A week before that, a Pennsylvania teenager was under investigation for corpse abuse after a self-managed pill abortion and burial of the fetus in her yard. In a grim sense, these are the lucky ones: they survived. Because Dobbs has indisputably been deadly. 'Mothers living in states that banned abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth' as mothers living in states where abortion was legal and accessible, reports the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Maternal mortality rose 56% in Texas after it enacted a six-week ban; a Texan's risk was one and a half times that of a Californian's. The future isn't sunny. A study of 14 total-ban states predicts that in the four years beginning a year after Dobbs, up to 42 mothers will die and as many as 2,700 will be afflicted with 'severe maternal morbidity', defined by the CDC as 'unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term [health] consequences'. In one analysis Black women represented 63% of the deaths. The anti-abortion movement is indefatigable. 'We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,' one leader told Oklahoma Voice. But this is an unattainable grail. Where abortion is illegal, people still have abortions. They just take more risks. Globally, more than 39,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortions. As they run out of options, red-state lawmakers will harden criminal penalties against people who refuse to give up their reproductive self-determination. It may grow less outré to endorse Trump's opinion, expressed in an unguarded moment, that women who get illegal abortions 'deserve some form of punishment'. Whether intentional or not, the sentence for some of those women will be death. Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books
