The U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate is Rising Dramatically

I bet the Republicans are involved somewhere:

Everything here is nuts. The Black maternal mortality rate is nearly 3x higher than the white rate. And the maternal mortality rate for everyone has nearly tripled since the late '90s. Meanwhile, in Europe, the maternal mortality rate has been steadily dropping and is now about one-third the US rate.

The big kicker is this: No one knows anything. No one knows why the rate has been skyrocketing. No one knows why the Black rate is so much higher than the white rate—while the Hispanic rate is a bit lower. In fact, we don't even have good data for the period from 2005-2018, so you'll see lots of different estimates for those years. (However, the big spike over the past three years comes direct from the CDC, which finally released new data a couple of years ago. It was the first in over a decade.) 

And we're still in the dark about why Black women suffer such an astonishingly high rate of maternal mortality.