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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that the Biden-Harris administration is awarding “over $558 million to improve maternal health, including $440 million to support pregnant and new moms, infants, and children.”
The press statement came while Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has been attempting to appear more moderate as she campaigns to gain the White House.
Harris and other Democrats have a long history of promoting abortion-on-demand, including taxpayer funding of the procedure, and of attacking pro-life pregnancy centers for providing some of the same services the Biden-Harris administration now says it is promoting with taxpayer funds.
“As someone who has spent my entire career fighting for the health and wellbeing of women and children,” Harris said in a press statement,
I am committed to addressing a maternal health crisis in which women across America are dying before, during, and after childbirth at higher rates than in any other developed nation.
That is why I called on states to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from two months to 12 months and announced the launch of the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis, an unprecedented whole-of-government strategy to improving maternal care.
The administration, said the announcement, has a commitment to “reducing the nation’s high maternal mortality rate through the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis.” The “crisis,” however, appears to be steeped in political ideology, as OB/GYN Ingrid Skop, M.D., the vice president and director of medical affairs for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, wrote in her summary of the issue in January 2023.
According to the Biden-Harris “blueprint,” many American mothers are experiencing “complications related to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum” that “can lead to devastating health outcomes—including hundreds of deaths each year.”
The administration presents “maternal mortality” especially as an area of disparate impact and inequity, and a health issue that is associated with pregnancy and childbirth:
Unfortunately, our nation has one of the highest maternal mortality rates of any wealthy country in the world. This maternal health crisis is particularly devastating for Black women, Native women, and women in rural communities who all experience maternal mortality and morbidity at significantly higher rates than their white and urban counterparts. That is why President Biden and Vice President Harris have worked to address this crisis with the urgency it demands.
Harris herself held a roundtable event in April 2021 on black maternal health.
Skop noted in her review that the most recent data, covering the period of 2017 to 2019 from 36 states’ maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs), revealed that “81.8% of pregnancy related deaths occurred in urban areas, and 18.2% in rural areas.” Of these, “84% were considered preventable, defined as ‘a chance it could have been averted with one or more reasonable changes to patient, community, provider, facility and/or systems factors.’”
The OB/GYN also named studies that documented there are actually “more deaths following abortion than childbirth,” including a 2002 “eight-year records-linkage study” from California Medicaid that found that “a woman was 162% more likely to die from all causes in the year after an abortion than after childbirth, 182% more likely to die in an accident, and 254% more likely to commit suicide.”
“The death rate two years after childbirth was 112/100,000 pregnancies and after abortion was 228.9/100,000,” Skop summarized:
The triad of infection, hemorrhage, and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which in the past accounted for >90% of all pregnancy-related deaths, now accounts for only about one-third of these deaths. New causes of death have emerged, and currently about half of pregnancy-related deaths involve cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and other medical conditions. “Deaths of despair” from mental health disorders are also increasingly common causes of maternal deaths.
The message from Biden-Harris is that pregnancy and childbirth are dangerous to women, particularly to those in specific racial and socio-economic groups. According to the 2024 Democratic Party platform, Medicaid “covers 65 percent of births to Black mothers and 58 percent of births to Latino mothers.”
The platform also continues the Democrats’ narrative that abortion is “health care,” and characterizes states that have placed restrictions on abortion as putting the “health and lives of women in jeopardy, forc[ing] women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten[ing] to criminalize doctors for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide.”
Since the Biden-Harris’ “blueprint” also promotes expanding Medicaid as the means to extend “lifesaving coverage to hundreds of thousands of new moms” and, in some states, Medicaid funds abortions, it is not clear if the new funds awarded could be used for abortions.
Skop provides some of the statistics related to the narrative on race and equity:
Obesity affects 47% of the non-Hispanic Black population and 47% of the Hispanic population, but only 38% of the non-Hispanic white population. Hypertension affects 40% of the non-Hispanic Black population, but only 26% of the Hispanic population and 27% of the non-Hispanic white population. Diabetes affects 13% of the non-Hispanic Black population and 12% of the Hispanic population, but only 7% of the non-Hispanic white population. An inherited thrombophilia will increase the propensity to form blood clots that block blood vessels and this occurs more commonly in the non-Hispanic Black population. These preconceptual factors may directly predispose to mortality due to disease-related complications, and they are also associated with early delivery and increased cesarean section rates, which indirectly raise mortality risk. Chronic hypertension may lead to preeclampsia or eclampsia, which accounts for 11.4% of deaths in non-Hispanic Black women, but only 6.5% of deaths in non-Hispanic white women.
There is always hope that all women can have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies and access the health care that can make that happen. But the Biden-Harris administration has moved to characterize pregnancy and childbirth as increasingly dangerous – mostly for women of color. At the same time, Democrats and the abortion industry present abortion as “lifesaving” and pro-life pregnancy centers, which provide material and emotional support for pregnant women and new mothers, are demonized.
The confused narrative, laced with political ideology, leads to questions about the real purpose of taxpayer funds portrayed as simply an offer to help new moms and babies.
