If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?<br />A woman in Texas is about 10 times as likely to die from pregnancy as one in Spain or Sweden,<br />and by all accounts, the health care plans proposed so far by Republicans would make maternal mortality even worse in Texas and across America.<br />The U. S. failure on maternal mortality is particularly striking<br />because around the world, maternal mortality has plunged by almost half since 1990; the U. S. is a rare country in which maternal deaths have become more common in recent years.<br />An American woman is about five times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a British woman — partly<br />because Britain makes a determined effort to save mothers’ lives, and we don’t.<br />Women die unnecessarily in Texas for many reasons, but it doesn’t help<br />that some women’s health clinics have closed and that access to Medicaid is difficult.<br />Saving lives also requires better prenatal care, yet more than a third of women in Texas don’t have a single prenatal visit in the first trimester.<br />Here in Texas, women die from pregnancy at a rate almost unrivaled in the industrialized world.
