Tag Archives: maternal mortality

the numbers on maternal mortality

The site Our World in Data likes to plot various statistics against GDP per capita. The U.S. is almost always below the middle, and sometimes towards the bottom, of the industrialized countries. On maternal mortality, the U.S. is orders of magnitude safer than many poor countries, but like other stats there is a noticeable gap with the leaders in our peer group (Finland, Iceland, France, Japan, Switzerland to name a few). Greece and Poland stand out as middle income countries that do much better than us. Interestingly, Belarus also stands out as a high-performance, lower-income country on this metric. The plot is animated, so you can see the U.S. drifting slightly worse over time even as our wealth grows, and even as other countries tend to make progress over time. I think I’ve said it before – we’re coasting on fumes, drifting behind the middle of the pack, and continuing to lose momentum.