‘A critical emergency’: America’s Black maternal mortality crisis

A patient and doctor in Jackson, Mississippi. The Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act, a package of 13 bills aimed at confronting the maternal mortality crisis in the US. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP

America is facing an intensified push to pass stalled federal legislation to address the US’s alarming maternal mortality rates and glaring racial disparities which have led to especially soaring death rates among Black women giving birth.

Maternal mortality rates in the US far outpace rates in other industrialized nations, with rates more than double those of countries such as France, Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany. Moms in the US are dying at the highest rates in the developed world.