CDC experts are defending how the agency calculates maternal deaths after researchers from several universities have said the CDC's method inflates numbers, according to Politico's reporting.
After the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics released a report in March 2023 that put the U.S. maternal mortality rate at around 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births.
But researchers decided to calculate this on their own and found a starkly different result: A death rate of 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the data, which was published March 12 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
The difference is in how the two groups calculated the maternal deaths.
"The high and rising rates of maternal mortality in the United States are a consequence of changes in maternal mortality surveillance, with reliance on the pregnancy checkbox leading to an increase in misclassified maternal deaths," authors of the study wrote. "Identifying maternal deaths by requiring mention of pregnancy among the multiple causes of death shows lower, stable maternal mortality rates and declines in maternal deaths from direct obstetrical causes."
The CDC approach, which has historically relied on a pregnancy checkbox to indicate if a deceased individual was indeed pregnant, has in the past led to an overcount of maternal deaths like the researchers found, the agency admitted.
However, the agency refuted the study's claims saying the researcher's calculations "produced a substantial undercount," and defended its data analysis.
"Capturing these otherwise unrecorded maternal deaths is critical to understanding the scope of maternal mortality in the United States and taking effective public health action to prevent these deaths," a CDC spokesperson told Politico. "The recent report’s analysis does not address this, nor does it provide evidence of how large any potential overcount may be."
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists also published a statement March 13, about the study researchers did, stating "this publication paints an incomplete picture and fails to highlight what we should be focusing on regarding maternal deaths — preventability," Christopher Zahn, MD, the ACOG's interim CEO and chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality said.
"The authors have created discrete categories to discredit the pregnancy checkbox, which, while somewhat flawed in its implementation, was not created to fabricate a problem. It was created to address an existing one," Dr. Zahn added. "It is one of multiple sources of data we have — each with its own pros and cons, showing different aspects of maternal health outcomes — that help to provide information so that we can create actionable solutions."
The CEO of the March of Dimes, Elizabeth Cherot, MD, also responded to the study's outcomes echoing the above and adding in a statement shared with Becker's that, "The fact is, one maternal death is one too many, and we simply cannot overlook the fact that as a nation we're not doing any better at saving moms" lives today than we were 20 years ago," she said. "… I'm also concerned that by suggesting we're overestimating maternal deaths, we overlook the dangers facing our nation's moms, especially Black moms."