Focus On Infants During Childbirth Leaves U.S. Moms In Danger

May 12, 2017 6:23 AM

Every year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die — by many measures, the worst record in the developed world. (Kleenex alert)
posted by Dashy (47 comments total)

Conscious that his role was husband rather than doctor, he had tried not to overstep.

Wow.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:53 AM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Well. Yes, of course we don't worry about women. What are women, anyway, except interchangeable machines for sex, work, baby-production, childcare and eldercare? Growing up in better times, I forgot that we basically live in Gilead.
posted by Frowner at 7:02 AM on May 12, 2017 [54 favorites]

Burn it all down.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:09 AM on May 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

This hits home for me. A friend lost his wife just two months ago due to complications following the birth of their third son. How can we be letting this happen? How do we not consider it a national crisis, to be losing so many women to deaths that are largely preventable?
posted by matcha action at 7:18 AM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Conscious that his role was husband rather than doctor, he had tried not to overstep.

Wow.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 8:53 AM on May 12


That's an extremely uncharitable reading of the article. As soon as he realized there was something amiss, he became very vocal with the doctors, up to and including calling his own trauma colleague, who was not involved with the case, but was the first to make the correct diagnosis. I would say he did everything right, and it's a travesty that the physicians in charge of his wife's care didn't listen.
posted by telepanda at 7:26 AM on May 12, 2017 [28 favorites]

Separately, this hits home for me in several arenas. I know a (low income, African American) family who lost the mother in childbirth with their third, and the effects have been devastating throughout the family, including the father, the great grandmother, and the children. The little girls are sweet kids, and it kills me to know that, given the environment in which they're growing up, the odds that they'll make it to adulthood in good shape are not in their favor.

In my own experience, which pales in comparison, my postpartum care was severely lacking. After the birth of my first, I developed an extremely painful anal fissure that caused nauseating levels of pain. I literally had to bite a towel to pass stool. The OB I saw shrugged, said it would probably resolve on its own, gave me the card of a gastroenterologist I could call if it didn't, and basically told me not to bother them again. I also developed severe pain in my nipples from breastfeeding, and when I called the OB office they wouldn't even see me. They said they could call in a prescription for some ointment in case it was thrush, but they didn't really do breasts. It was humiliating and demoralizing at a time when I was hurting and depressed (but lying about it on the postpartum survey, because why would I tell the truth to THOSE fucks) and had neither the physical or mental wherewithal to find a new primary care physician. I had thought that OBs provided postpartum care and didn't have a PCP available to call.
posted by telepanda at 7:41 AM on May 12, 2017 [27 favorites]

Every year, Mother's Day brings terrible stories in the media about mothers. Usually the stories are judging mothers in some way. This is the first year I can remember with a terrible story about how the system is failing mothers.
posted by Burn.Don't.Freeze at 7:58 AM on May 12, 2017 [9 favorites]

Too many of my friends have stories of shitty intra- and postpartum care. I'm increasingly convinced that the only way for women to win (i.e. be treated almost like human beings instead of disposable afterthoughts) is to not play the game.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 8:03 AM on May 12, 2017 [20 favorites]

Not play which game? Existing?
posted by XtinaS at 8:04 AM on May 12, 2017 [28 favorites]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 8:10 AM on May 12, 2017 [25 favorites]

...yeah, fair point.

:adds whiskey to coffee:
posted by XtinaS at 8:19 AM on May 12, 2017 [25 favorites]

it's a travesty that the physicians in charge of his wife's care didn't listen

That's what I meant. I was trying to imagine being her husband post-mortem and it stunned me. How frustrating. How easy to feel at fault.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 8:33 AM on May 12, 2017

That chart. All the current misogyny through policy from the Republicans. I think about leaving the country so my daughter can have a better life but it seems so hard, finding new jobs, a community. The greatest nation on earth, don't you know?
posted by amanda at 8:34 AM on May 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm 29 weeks pregnant with my first and this article really hit me hard. I'm sure part of that's pregnancy hormones that make me extra sensitive to things like this (like that detail about the gravestone design, oh god). But it's also terrifying to read on a personal level right now, and angering to think about the systemic and societal forces that keep letting this happen. She was a nurse at that hospital, her husband was a doctor, and she still died of something that should have been caught and treated. What hope is there for anyone else? Especially women who are already marginalized in the medical system. Ugh.
posted by radiomayonnaise at 8:36 AM on May 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

This is just so shocking and WOW, does that OB suck. I mean, I'm NOT a medical professional and as soon as Lauren mentioned abdominal pain, my brain shot right to postpartum pre-e or HELLP. I mean, I had a friend with HELLP so I'm a bit hypervigilant about it but COME ON. How could they miss that? WTF. FUCKING HEARTBURN. WHAT.

I was shocked in my twenties when my close friends started having babies at the lack of postpartum care they received. When I was visiting my BFF after the birth of her first baby and asked her when her next appointment with her OB was and she said EIGHT WEEKS, I almost passed out. I think my friends who had c-sections - MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY - went in for an exam in 4-6 weeks. WTF. No one checks incisions, stitches, tears, makes sure they're not having severe pp mood disorders, problems breastfeeding for over a month.

Meanwhile, you have to drag your baby in to the pediatrician's office WEEKLY. I think pediatricians end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting in checking in with new moms. I know my son's lovely doctor, in those early visits, always asked how I was doing, if things were healing up okay, did I need anything.
posted by Aquifer at 9:03 AM on May 12, 2017 [14 favorites]

I too had trouble transitioning out of OB care back to a GP ... In my case because my wonderful GP of 10 years moved away the week I had the baby, and her replacement was terrible, and this all occurred when I wasn't sleeping AND when all the big local health plans had their yearly insurance shuffle so it was maddening to get in as a new patient anywhere because nobody knew who covered whom.

Anyway complications from my uterine rupture were just sorta let ride. For eight months. Finally got in with a new person four weeks ago.

It's not really anyone's fault (well, yes, I guess that's the point, it's systemic), but it's damn bad medicine. Why doesn't my (generally excellent) OB designate a Women's Health Care Practitioner (a licensed thing here, like an APN) to follow OB patients for a year and help with post partum things and breastfeeding and be sure they're transitioned back to a GP before de-rostering them?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:12 AM on May 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Anyone who blithely describes pregnancy and birth as no big deal, every forced birth proponent, every single person who believes that you can avoid getting ill or dying just because you "do the right things" should be made to read this article.

And Medicare covers as little as 60 days post-birth? That's appalling. I hadn't even seen the urologist by then (this is in the UK).
posted by threetwentytwo at 9:17 AM on May 12, 2017 [21 favorites]

Pediatricians absolutely do the post-partum heavy lifting and it's weird. They're the ones that do the PPD screenings, not your own doctors.

We picked the peds we did precisely because they had a breastfeeding clinic attached to the practice (which we used a lot because breastfeeding was a total shitshow) but that is very unusual. I had a c-section, stayed in the hospital for three days and did not see my midwife again until 6 weeks pp (at which I had an IUD installed). My midwives were actually great while I was in the hospital, though. My delivery went kind of pear-shaped and they came to visit me every day on their rounds (even though my care had been passed to OB because of the section) just to talk about how I was feeling, both physically and emotionally. It was really important to me that they did that because it was a traumatic birth. But I've talked to a lot of other moms who were pretty much just abandoned.

We were discharged from the hospital on July 4 and that "weekends and holidays" thing is absolutely real. Our discharge was a total clusterfuck, I did not get released with the pain meds prescriptions I was supposed to get (which I only realized after I got home and looked at my discharge papers), we got forgotten about for several hours in between "We're just getting your paperwork together and you're almost ready to go home!" and "Oh hey, you can go now." (Also no wheelchair ride to the car! They were just like, oh, I guess you guys are still here, huh? Well, bye, you can leave now.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:19 AM on May 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Pre-eclampsia is poorly understood and quite dangerous. I would love to know how much money is devoted to researching it. It's can only affect women, so, yeah.
posted by theora55 at 9:34 AM on May 12, 2017 [9 favorites]

Pre-eclampsia is poorly understood and quite dangerous. I would love to know how much money is devoted to researching it. It's can only affect women, so, yeah.

I was so ENRAGED about this when I was pregnant! (And still am, actually.) I had pregnancy-induced hypertension so my midwives watched me like a hawk for pre-e and I was so scared all the time. Oh, it's sooo poorly understood and mysterious! WOMEN STILL DIE FROM IT. FIND OUT WHY.

But hey, it's just women. No big loss.
posted by Aquifer at 9:37 AM on May 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

> I was shocked in my twenties when my close friends started having babies at the lack of postpartum care they received.

I watched however many episodes of Call the Midwife a while back. Nurses visit pregnant women in their homes! They come to do postpartum care every day! Paid for by the NHS!
posted by rtha at 9:50 AM on May 12, 2017 [12 favorites]

The American Pregnancy Association does not mention death at all on their page for preclampsia.

You know...cause it's no big.
posted by teleri025 at 9:54 AM on May 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Aquifer: Oh, it's sooo poorly understood and mysterious! WOMEN STILL DIE FROM IT. FIND OUT WHY.

The stupider part is that they don't need to understand it in order to treat it. There's already a working treatment. They just need to apply it. Just apply the existing treatment, and less women will die.

I wonder how much the neglect is driven by the fact that it apparently mostly happens to poor and minority women. In this case, attention is being brought to the issue because a privileged white man started a lawsuit.
posted by clawsoon at 9:55 AM on May 12, 2017 [10 favorites]

I had decent prenatal care 30 years ago, and far less expensive even in 1987 dollars. But even though I was at high risk for a surgical delivery, I got no education about it. Even then, c-sections were about 25% of births, so it's a pretty stupid omission. I read an awful lot about pregnancy, labor, and birth, and c-section still doesn't get a lot of detail. After induced labor that lasted a while, I had a surgical delivery. I came home from the hospital and ended up going back several hours later with an infection. 3 days of IV antibiotics. Going back to the hospital with a newborn sucks. You have to go to a general ward; you can't go back to maternity, though they were helpful. And having a hospital-induced infection makes you terrified about all the other infections on a general hospital floor. The hospital staff were pretty surprised when I questioned them about hand-washing. Everybody wants to hold your newborn. I had other minor complications that weren't in any of the literature but turn out to be common. There's this concept of magical birth surrounded by a rosy glow. Birth is messy, dangerous, work. Parts of my delivery were over-medicalized, parts under-medicalized.

The emotional parts of this story are heart-breaking. But the idea of doctors rejecting checklists pisses me off. No, you don't get to cling to your preferences; you have to respect scientific method.

There's a part of the article about how the death of a mother is especially bad. That's true, it leaves a child without a parent, and the women in ths story are especially sympathetic. But every death is especially bad. When your parent dies, it's especially bad. Romanticizing women doesn't help. The preventable deaths of mothers who were drug addicts, or jerks, or fathers, or anybody, are tragic.
posted by theora55 at 9:56 AM on May 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

So I had severe pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome. I knew something was really wrong when I woke up and my eyes wouldn't point in the same direction; my right eye was lagging following my left eye. I'm still furious that when I called the doctor's office the nurse said "oh just come in for your appointment tomorrow, call an ambulance if anything bad happens." But when I did go in, my awesome OBGYN took my blood pressure and immediately said "you are going to the hospital NOW" and from then on it was vigilant monitoring of my blood pressure and pumping me full of that burning magnesium stuff and a follow-up appointment like two weeks after delivery.

AAgh but still I wonder WHY? Why didn't anyone say at any point in my pregnancy, "hey, a sharp burning in your upper chest, nausea, puffiness, these are signs of pre-eclampsia and you should know that"? I had those symptoms for a week, I could have had a stroke at any time, it's dumb luck that I didn't.

That's what we tell women in the country about pregnancy, I guess. Lots of advice and fussing about coffee and wine and soft cheeses, but no mentioning of really scary pre-eclampsia stuff. This is why I'm never, ever, ever going to be pregnant again if I can help it.

Anyhow this woman's symptoms were classic HELLP, it's utter bullshit her doctor didn't see it, FUUUUUUCK those people so hard.
posted by daisystomper at 9:57 AM on May 12, 2017 [27 favorites]

I watched however many episodes of Call the Midwife a while back. Nurses visit pregnant women in their homes! They come to do postpartum care every day! Paid for by the NHS!
posted by rtha at 9:50 AM on May 12 [+] [!]

We live in the US so had to pay for it entirely out of pocket, but the pre- and post-natal care from my homebirth midwife was absolutely spectacular. In addition to multiple home visits of 1 hr+ after the baby was born, she checked in frequently in the weeks and months following. She also makes home visits to assist when there are breastfeeding difficulties. It has been difficult adjusting back to the standard family doc/GP model of care. I'm not planning on becoming pregnant anytime soon but am already saving money so we can afford a homebirth for our next baby.
posted by FamilyBand at 10:15 AM on May 12, 2017

I came to Metafilter to post this, so thank you for doing so, Dashy.

I work in the quality of care field, and I can tell you very, very little is done for quality improvement in this area. There are plenty of people who care about it passionately - I know Dr. Main professionally, whose work is mentioned, and he's a real hero in this field - but there is little institutional/political will to make changes. There is simply no funding to improve this care because it is not a priority, and what isn't paid for isn't done. It is a crime. Development of measures to improve the quality of care is primarily funded by the government (and we all know how the government feels about women's health!) or by specialty groups. I was actually quite surprised to read that Merck is doing so much, but kudos to them, they deserve every ounce of positive press they get about that work.

At the facility where I had my child, a woman died of missed pre-eclampsia a few months before I delivered. The staff were super, super on top of monitoring blood pressure by the time I came through, but that should not have been the way they learned. The doctors mentioned in the article who don't want to improve their care practices should have their licenses revoked.

I was appalled (but not terribly surprised...) that this report didn't talk more about racial disparities, and I can only hope there's a part 2 coming. Black women are four times as likely as white women to die in pregnancy and childbirth. The woman profiled in the article sounds like an amazing person, and her loss is a tragedy all around, especially for her family. But it's important to know that many of the root causes of poor maternal outcomes are systemic. It is, truly, the sign of societal failure.
posted by john_snow at 10:24 AM on May 12, 2017 [19 favorites]

I watched however many episodes of Call the Midwife a while back. Nurses visit pregnant women in their homes! They come to do postpartum care every day! Paid for by the NHS!

We still kind of get that after birth! Although it seems to vary a bit depending on where in the UK you are. I got five midwife visits at home over the first ten days after coming home from hospital with my daughter.
posted by Catseye at 10:44 AM on May 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

This is exactly why arguments of "the science is settled!" and "just trust your doctor!" infuriate me. Doctors are people; they are motivated by money and fear and sloth just like everyone else. And they can do better, just like everyone else. It's a choice whether or not they do, and it's a choice whether or not to trust them over your own instincts.
posted by vignettist at 11:01 AM on May 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

Nurses visit pregnant women in their homes! They come to do postpartum care every day!

I gave birth in the US in a free standing birth center, with midwives only. People are never shocked when they hear we were home three hours after my son was born. What really surprises them is that we had every other day in-home visits for two weeks after the birth.
posted by anastasiav at 11:12 AM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

In my experience, postpartum care in the US is horrible. I experienced little support after birth from hospital/medical care providers, despite complications that were admittedly caused by the OB/GYN's malpractice. I was fortunate it was not serious enough to be fatal! The attitude toward postpartum care in the US needs to change.

Yet I find the framing of this article as "babies vs. mothers" to be gross and and unnecessary. Isn't infant mortality something like 20x higher than maternal mortality? In that case, wouldn't one expect more resources focused on preventing infant mortality given the much greater magnitude of its incidence? And in cases of HELLP/pre-eclampsia that occur during pregnancy (rather than postpartum), the baby's life is also very much in danger. Ignoring or failing to treat HELLP/pre-eclampsia results in infant deaths (often from preterm birth) as well as maternal deaths. The way statistics are presented in the article is also misleading in its effort to support the "babies vs. mothers" thesis - for example, the claim that in Britain, pre-eclampsia maternal deaths are one or two in a million, but in the U.S. 8% of maternal deaths are due to pre-eclampsia. But that 8% figure is out of maternal *deaths*, not all births as in the Britain figure of "one or two in a million." While the comparable Britain rate is likely lower than the US, why use these inconsistent metrics except to make the US sound far worse by comparison?
posted by Mallenroh at 11:22 AM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm really really grateful to be pregnant in Canada right now, where my the mother mortality rate is a bit lower, and hopefully there are good protocols in place for all the common preventable causes of death.

But back to the US - is there a way to publish the hospitals that have adopted the new protocols and make them publically available? Then consumer pressure might drive the lagging hospitals to adopt new standards much faster than the quoted 17 years. I mean that's the one good thing about consumer choice, right?
posted by tatiana131 at 11:30 AM on May 12, 2017

Tatiana, I was looking for that kind of data to post here, and I really can't find anything. I can't even find maternal mortality by hospital, to help women avoid particularly problematic facilities. I found the general reviews by state that look at data from a few years ago, but those don't seem to include any details, even by geographic region.

(Unrelated, but I found it really depressing that, at least in my state, homicide and suicide were top causes of maternal death.)
posted by oryelle at 11:35 AM on May 12, 2017

Yet I find the framing of this article as "babies vs. mothers" to be gross and and unnecessary.

I agree. There is no reason the focus cannot be "babies AND mothers".

Our infant mortality numbers are terrible. It's lesser-appreciated that our maternal mortality numbers are about as bad, given that our medicine should lead the world. Completely unacceptable on both fronts, together AND individually.
posted by Dashy at 11:35 AM on May 12, 2017

I think the issue is the framing of "maternal and child health care" always equals the child; women's health issues simply are ignored and the attitude is "oh, we're focused on babies, good enough!". There was a seminal article written in 1983 in the Lancet, Where's the M in MCH, all about the failure to focus on the mothers when talking about maternal and child health, and sadly, almost 35 years later, we're still not talking enough about mothers.

You are correct, Mallenroh, that many more infants than mothers die. However, the fact is that virtually ALL of the maternal deaths were preventable; unfortunately, that is not as true of the babies, with our current medical technology. 20% of infant deaths are due to congenital abnormalities; another 20% are due to preterm/low birthweight - as you mention, issues that are often triggered by the same maternal health problems that cause women to die. As someone working in this field, it's not framed as moms vs. babies, it's that the focus is only on babies. Of course saving babies is important! But not at the cost of completely disregarding women's health - how are maternal-fetal medicine specialists not trained in maternal health at all, for example?
posted by john_snow at 11:36 AM on May 12, 2017 [33 favorites]

And, to speak to Oryelle's point, we don't measure maternal mortality by hospital (although we do measure deaths by other causes, such as stroke or surgery or cardiovascular issues, per hospital). At the very lowest level of analysis, you'll find state-level data, which is utterly unhelpful to the consumer. You might be able to find data for large cities also, like NYC, but definitely not at the community level to assist you in choosing a facility. Goes back to what I said above, we don't value this topic, so we don't measure it, so we don't report it....so it doesn't get improved.
posted by john_snow at 11:39 AM on May 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

You can read more about the ways that this particular tragedy is and isn't representative in New Jersey here. The racial disparity is particularly glaring, 'with blacks experiencing deaths at a rate of five times that of their white counterparts.'

Treatment for drug related issues (both illegal drug use and misuse of legal prescriptions), postpartum depression, and cardiac events are also key issues that seem to be missing here.
posted by oryelle at 12:14 PM on May 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was twenty when I had my daughter in 2001. I had pregnancy-induced hypertension from around 26-27 weeks. She was induced at 33 weeks when I developed pulmonary edema after landing in the hospital after having a massive migraine during my birthing classes. I was already on bedrest after being hospitalized once before, so I was told I wasn't being discharged until I had the baby.

I had the lovely magnesium infusions as well as a lot of Lasix because of how much fluid had built up. I was lucky in a way because I was at a teaching hospital, so it was monitored a lot more it seems. I don't recall much more since I was really not there during labor thanks to the meds.

She stayed in the NICU for 26 days, mostly to grow, as she was breathing room air by the time she was a day old thanks to the steroid shots they gave me to help her lungs finish maturing. She's an honors student now, finishing up her sophomore year in high school. I had a lactation consult so I could pump my milk for her to have during her stay, but got zero help after her discharge which was very discouraging.

That being said, from what I remember, it was a 25% chance with first-time mothers to develop it, and the possibility of having it a second time goes down a bit up to a certain point, when it returns to first-time mother levels.

I do recall only seeing my OB at four weeks post delivery which I luckily did not have any tears or anything but my proteins were still elevated. And yeah, not having any more follow-up was not a good thing as I was basically at home with an infant who was not allowed to go out in public for six months after her discharge. I was only allowed to take her to her WIC and doctor appointments.
posted by tlwright at 1:25 PM on May 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

This article is really distressing to me on several levels, but I'm most appalled by that chart. How can the US be such an outlier? No war on women, we're a color-blind society, yeah right.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:25 PM on May 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

I still recall vividly the family we met while my brother was in the ICU some years back. The patient was a new mom who had contracted septicemia after giving birth, and the whole family (much as in the FPP article) which had gathered for the birth was now gathered in the ICU, waiting to see whether she would survive.

The sentiment on the ICU floor -- like the article says, everyone in an ICU gets very tight very quickly -- was pretty much 100% shock: "what is this, 1885? how is it possible for someone to maybe die in childbirth like a goddamn Dickens novel?" To which the nurses responded that yeah, it's not actually that rare, nobody likes to talk about it. One of the nurses who was working with my brother actually got into the statistics with me a little. The situation was, in the end, what gave me the resolve to suck up my anxieties and start volunteering at an abortion clinic.

I don't know whether that new mom survived, or in what shape; she was still in a coma when my brother was transferred out. This was ten years ago; I'm not surprised but definitely disgusted that nothing seems to have improved.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:47 PM on May 12, 2017 [9 favorites]

I'm only part way through the article, but it has mentioned Tara Hansen and all I can think is that given a choice between listening to a woman and letting her die, a depressing percentage of doctors will go for Option B.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 3:25 PM on May 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

"The situation was, in the end, what gave me the resolve to suck up my anxieties and start volunteering at an abortion clinic."

My mother told me once that one of the reasons she joined the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League as a young woman was the experience of having a neighbour of hers die in childbirth (after having child after child after child...).
posted by Secret Sparrow at 4:41 PM on May 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

This article is really distressing to me on several levels, but I'm most appalled by that chart.

I think I audibly gasped when I scrolled down and saw that chart. The sudden steep upward slope starting at 2000, the dramatic difference in percentages between the US and the rest of the developed world. It's appalling and distressing, and yet, once the initial shock hit me, it wasn't even that surprising.

I mean, what else could we expect? Considering how many people think it's totally okay to force women to stay pregnant because what about the fetuses and the fact that we know so often women's symptoms are minimized and ignored by medical professionals and how generally fucked up the healthcare system is in this country.

Reading this article I just kept alternating between wanting to cry and wanting to just break something because the rage I felt was just so beyond words.

UGH. I am so tired of being trapped in this horrible dystopian nightmare timeline.
posted by litera scripta manet at 8:58 PM on May 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'm 35 weeks pregnant and like radiomayonnaise, found that really hard to read. More things to be terrified about for the next month. My blood pressure has been awesome so far, but as soon as it starts to go up I'll be making a stink because of this article. Maybe I should print out a list of pre-e/HELLP signs to give to my partner in the event I'm too out of it to advocate for myself.
posted by weathergal at 11:41 AM on May 13, 2017

Yeah, my mother had three deliveries, and basically three horror stories. And I never stopped to think about it before, but two of us were born on holidays.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:30 PM on May 13, 2017

Thank you, Dashy, for posting this, and thanks to everyone else who has been contributing to this thread - I really appreciate reading this discussion and I'm very glad that NPR and Propublica are investigating this issue.

It's so upsetting how little progress we've made in the U.S. in terms of prioritizing women during pregnancy. My mother dealt with these same issues when she was pregnant, decades ago. Even though she has a medical background, and my parents were able to afford good medical care, it was relatively easy for her to get good care for her child but it was a struggle to get adequate care for herself as well. She was surprised that maternal health was such a low priority then, and I'm shocked that it continues to be such a low priority to this day.
posted by photoelectric at 9:03 PM on May 13, 2017

I live in the UK - I feel very lucky as I was monitored very closely in both of my pregnancies and during labour. My blood pressure was monitored 2-3 times a day after I gave birth. This is such a sad story - I know there were many factors that contributed, but in my opinion, it was mainly because the hospital ignored her blood pressure readings.
posted by SpiersEngineeringSafety at 3:57 AM on May 14, 2017