Besides facing greater mortality rates due to heart disease, cancer and overdoses, Connecticut’s Black residents also face higher rates of maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity.
Data from the Connecticut Maternal Mortality Review Committee shows that there were five pregnancy-related deaths per year, on average, in the latter half of the past decade, and Black residents were the only racial group to be overrepresented. Of the 31 deaths in that time period, six were Black residents (19%), a share higher than Black residents’ makeup of all live births. For other racial groups, their share of live births exceeded their share of pregnancy-related deaths.
These numbers only include deaths that occur during pregnancy or within one year of the end of the pregnancy resulting from a pregnancy complication, a chain of events initiated by pregnancy, or the aggravation of an unrelated condition by physiologic effects of pregnancy.
Researchers note that given the small number of cases, ratios were not computed for racial ethnic subgroups, and statistical testing was not conducted.
The state trends, though, mirror national trends, which show that Black women across the United States have the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, according to data compiled by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports health care research.
Earlier this year, the Connecticut Maternal Mortality Review Committee put out recommendations on how to prevent more pregnancy-related deaths after reviewing all deaths from 2020 to 2021.
Some labor and delivery cases, however, don’t result in death but can still cause life-threatening complications, such as sepsis, shock and heart failure. In these cases of severe maternal morbidity, Black residents have had higher rates in most years from 2010 to 2020.
Researchers note that the number of cases for Asian mothers was too small and “unstable” to make trend analyses or to derive any conclusions, so they made a separate analysis combining data from 2018 through 2020 for every racial group. Those results showed that for every 10,000 deliveries by Black residents in that time frame, 142 resulted in severe maternal morbidity, compared to 89 for Asians, 86 for Hispanics, and 68 for White residents.