“For more than 20 years, researchers have been talking about the death and homicide of women associated with pregnancy,” says Phyllis Sharps, a nurse scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland.
The consensus, he says, is that this is happening in large part due to intimate partner violence.
The researchers found that American women who are pregnant or were pregnant in the past 42 days (the postpartum period) die from homicide at more than double the death rate from hemorrhage or placental disorders, the leading causes of what are generally classified as pregnancy-related deaths.
In addition, getting pregnant increases the risk of death from homicide: between the ages of 10 and 44, women who are pregnant or terminated their pregnancy in the past year die at a rate 16% higher than women who are not pregnant.
Reproductive epidemiologist Maeve Wallace of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and her colleagues analyzed death data in all 50 US states, between 2018 and 2019, using information from the National Center for Statistics database. Health Department, which is hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2003, the United States began requiring death certificates to indicate whether a person had died during pregnancy, or within 42 days or up to a year of the end of gestational status.
By 2010, about 37 states included this option on their certificates; by 2018, all 50 states required this information. This year, Wallace and his colleagues analyzed the resulting records.
In 2018 and 2019, a total of 273 women died by homicide while pregnant or within a year from the end of their pregnancy.