pregnancy-related deaths last year, according to a government report released on Wednesday. It says that it is a crisis that has disproportionately claimed Black and Hispanic women as victims.
The report lays out trends across the country for expectant mothers and their newborn babies, the news agency AP reported. According to government data, pregnancy-related deaths have spiked by around 80% since 2018, with Covid-19 being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 fatalities reported last year.
Besides this, the percentage of preterm and low birth weight babies also went up during the same time period. The report stated that this trend was steady for years and more pregnant or postpartum women are reporting symptoms of depression.
Karen Tabb Dina, a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said, "We were already in the middle of a crisis with maternal mortality in our country.