Two recently released reports on Texas maternity death rates are truly unsettling, to say the least. The maternity death rate has spiked almost 100 percent in a span of four years. According to The Dallas Morning News, the rate in 2010 was 18.6 per 100,000 births, and in 2014, it had spiked to 35.8. The Dallas Morning News culled the data from a recently issued report. A separate, second report showed the maternity death rate for African-Americans was twice as high as White mothers.
Maternity deaths are the ones that happen within a year of giving birth, and collecting such data are crucial to understanding the level and ease of accessibility to maternal and pregnancy-related health care. The dual reports shed a bright light on an otherwise dark spot that represents shortcomings of a vital healthcare component. The reports by themselves do not address these problems other than reporting. Because of a 2011 ruling by the then-Texas Attorney-General, and now the Governor, Greg Abbott, it is not possible for any news outlet or any of the state's concerned citizens to ask for and access to more information in order to analyze and identify what has caused the spike in maternity death rate. Although the goal of the 2011 ruling was to protect the privacy of patients, it had unintended consequence by restricting any effort to carry out a root-cause analysis for any trend of adverse healthcare outcomes.
The state department of health and human services, instead of hiding behind the cloak of privacy, should immediately take on a thorough and comprehensive endeavor to find out the causal factors behind the spike in maternal death rate. It may not need to compromise on the privacy factors as much it wants us to believe. First, it needs to identify whether there is geographical concentration of hotspots where the spikes have been observed. Second, if that's the case, it needs to zero on the primary sources of maternal deaths in those hot spots. Third, it needs to assess the degree of easiness of and accessibility to the family planning and maternity-related health care there. As there is concerted effort in recent years to curb abortion in Texas, one unintended consequence has been the increased difficulty of state's minority, poor and rural population to affordable family planning pregnancy and maternity care. It's not an option for the state to stay mum and on the sidelines in the face of these two embarrassing reports.
Maternity deaths are the ones that happen within a year of giving birth, and collecting such data are crucial to understanding the level and ease of accessibility to maternal and pregnancy-related health care. The dual reports shed a bright light on an otherwise dark spot that represents shortcomings of a vital healthcare component. The reports by themselves do not address these problems other than reporting. Because of a 2011 ruling by the then-Texas Attorney-General, and now the Governor, Greg Abbott, it is not possible for any news outlet or any of the state's concerned citizens to ask for and access to more information in order to analyze and identify what has caused the spike in maternity death rate. Although the goal of the 2011 ruling was to protect the privacy of patients, it had unintended consequence by restricting any effort to carry out a root-cause analysis for any trend of adverse healthcare outcomes.
The state department of health and human services, instead of hiding behind the cloak of privacy, should immediately take on a thorough and comprehensive endeavor to find out the causal factors behind the spike in maternal death rate. It may not need to compromise on the privacy factors as much it wants us to believe. First, it needs to identify whether there is geographical concentration of hotspots where the spikes have been observed. Second, if that's the case, it needs to zero on the primary sources of maternal deaths in those hot spots. Third, it needs to assess the degree of easiness of and accessibility to the family planning and maternity-related health care there. As there is concerted effort in recent years to curb abortion in Texas, one unintended consequence has been the increased difficulty of state's minority, poor and rural population to affordable family planning pregnancy and maternity care. It's not an option for the state to stay mum and on the sidelines in the face of these two embarrassing reports.
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