Jill Herendeen

Why the U.s. Gets the Worst Childbirth Outcomes in the Industrialized World Jill Herendeen

Publisher Marketing: The United States gets the worst childbirth results in the industrialized world, and has for many years. Amnesty International took notice of our climbing maternal mortality rate a few years ago, and declared it a violation of human rights. We are #52 in the world in maternity results-some developing countries have gotten ahead of us--unless we've dropped still further since 2011; according to this Huffington Post article from May of 2014, we're now up to 60th. You and your baby would have better odds surviving birth in forty other countries; and if you're a woman of color, your odds would improve dramatically. To achieve this dismal result, we spend twice as much money, per birth, as any other country. Solving the problem would be a lot cheaper than maintaining the status quo. There are at least 52 countries which provide health care, one way or another, to ALL their citizens, for half as much as we spend annually, and we're not even getting health care to a lot of our citizens. Medicaid covers about half of U. S. births, but a lot of mothers have incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid, without enough ready cash to pay for qualified assistance for birth. Also, Medicaid dollars don't go to the mothers themselves -- they go to obstetricians and hospitals (though about 10 states will pay out-of-hospital midwives) to pay for medical care. Medicaid dollars don't pay for keeping mom off her feet or well-nourished. To fix the problem, all we need is a comparative analysis of those other countries' systems, decide which we like best, and adopt that.