The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy nation — and unlike its peers, that rate is getting worse. This project investigates why, where intervention would matter most, and what policy exports from top-performing countries could look like in practice.
the highest regional MMR — Southeast Arkansas. More than 3× the rate of the safest region in the same three states.
the lowest — Northern Mississippi. Still nearly 10× the rate in Norway, the world's safest country to give birth.
the gap between the highest and lowest regions. Within the same geography, outcomes vary wildly.
Maternal mortality is one of the only headline health indicators where the U.S. has gone backwards while every comparable country has improved. Our goal is to make the scale of that reversal unignorable — and to trace it to specific, fixable causes.
We're building a data-first investigation that (a) examines regional and racial disparities in maternal death, (b) identifies the leading causes and how they've shifted, (c) benchmarks U.S. performance against top-performing countries to surface transferable policy, and (d) investigates why U.S. rates continue to rise while peer countries' fall.
The data sources we rely on — CDC NCHS, the World Bank, OECD, and peer-reviewed work out of NEJM and NIH — each involve methodology choices. These are the priors we're operating under:
We use the WHO definition of a maternal death: a death during pregnancy or within 42 days of its end from pregnancy-related causes.
We accept the CDC's Maternal Mortality Review Committees' standard that a death is "preventable" if reasonable changes by patient, provider, facility, system, or community could have averted it.
Cross-country comparisons use OECD harmonized rates. U.S. state and county-level numbers may be noisier and we flag small-n rows.
We focus on deaths within the 42-day window. Extending to 1 year (late maternal deaths) roughly doubles the U.S. figure, but that's for a later build.
Three tables pulled directly from our database, each paired with three visualizations. Every number on this page comes from one of our three PHP endpoints — the same feeds that will power live, interactive versions in M3.
All 14 reporting regions across Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
| State | Region | Avg MMR | Birth Centers | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas | Southeast | 58.6 | 55 | Highest |
| Arkansas | Southwest | 56.7 | 27 | Highest |
| Alabama | West Black Belt | 55.0 | 21 | Highest |
| Alabama | South | 48.0 | 57 | Elevated |
| Arkansas | Northwest | 45.6 | 66 | Elevated |
| Alabama | East | 42.0 | 15 | Elevated |
| Alabama | Central | 38.0 | 85 | Mid |
| Arkansas | Northeast | 32.8 | 55 | Mid |
| Alabama | North | 32.0 | 48 | Mid |
| Mississippi | Central | 31.5 | 104 | Lower |
| Mississippi | South | 30.1 | 134 | Lower |
| Arkansas | Central | 21.4 | 66 | Lowest |
| Mississippi | Delta | 20.5 | 35 | Lowest |
| Mississippi | North | 17.8 | 70 | Lowest |
A slider across the 14 regions that re-sorts the chart in real time — by MMR, by birth center count, or by the ratio between the two. A second toggle lets the user isolate one state at a time for apples-to-apples comparison. The goal: turn this static ranking into a hands-on comparison tool.
The 15 most populous counties across our three states — showing whether the largest communities have proportional access.
| State | County | Region | Women 15–44 | Birth Centers | MMR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | Jefferson | Central | 138,186 | 37 | 38.0 |
| Alabama | Mobile | South | 82,893 | 33 | 48.0 |
| Arkansas | Pulaski | Central | 81,512 | 17 | 21.4 |
| Alabama | Madison | North | 78,302 | 12 | 32.0 |
| Arkansas | Benton | Northwest | 60,692 | 13 | 45.6 |
| Arkansas | Washington | Northwest | 57,085 | 19 | 45.6 |
| Alabama | Tuscaloosa | Central | 53,233 | 6 | 38.0 |
| Mississippi | Hinds | Central | 48,018 | 39 | 31.5 |
| Alabama | Montgomery | Central | 47,258 | 14 | 38.0 |
| Alabama | Shelby | Central | 44,440 | 2 | 38.0 |
| Mississippi | Harrison | South | 41,534 | 14 | 30.1 |
| Alabama | Lee | East | 41,396 | 1 | 42.0 |
| Alabama | Baldwin | South | 41,284 | 4 | 48.0 |
| Mississippi | DeSoto | North | 39,558 | 3 | 17.8 |
| Mississippi | Rankin | Central | 32,253 | 10 | 31.5 |
A filterable county explorer: set a minimum population and a maximum birth-centers threshold, and the map + table update to show only qualifying access deserts. Hover reveals drive-time to the nearest center in a neighboring county. This turns a static 230-row dataset into a targeting tool for policy advocacy.
The clearest measure of whether a region's healthcare supply matches its need.
| Rank | State | County | Centers / 1,000 women | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arkansas | Chicot | 4.25 | Highest |
| 2 | Arkansas | Monroe | 3.96 | Highest |
| 3 | Arkansas | Bradley | 3.87 | Highest |
| 4 | Alabama | Bibb | 3.85 | Highest |
| 5 | Mississippi | Jefferson | 3.25 | High |
| — ACCESS DESERTS — | ||||
| ▼ | Alabama | Bullock | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Alabama | Butler | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Alabama | Fayette | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Alabama | Marion | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Alabama | St. Clair | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Arkansas | Franklin | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Arkansas | Howard | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Arkansas | Little River | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Arkansas | Nevada | 0.000 | None |
| ▼ | Arkansas | Perry | 0.000 | None |
If a user picks any access-desert county, the tool models what its MMR would look like if it matched the access ratio of the best-performing county in the same region. Converts a statistical relationship into a concrete number: "In my county, X preventable deaths per year."
The foundational material that informs every chart on this site. Peer-reviewed research, official statistical agencies, and non-partisan policy institutes only.
Clinical-review analysis finding that roughly 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are classified as preventable, even as U.S. MMR rose 136% between 1990 and 2013 while other developed nations' rates fell 38%.
Tracks state-level maternal mortality in the wake of the Dobbs decision: states with abortion bans saw an average 56% increase in maternal mortality; states with protective policies saw a 21% decrease.
Official U.S. vital-statistics data showing Black women die at 4.5× the rate of Asian women — the largest racial mortality gap for this metric of any high-income country.
Cross-country harmonized data 2000–2023. Documents the U.S.-specific finding that homicide, suicide, and drug overdose have replaced hemorrhage as leading causes of U.S. maternal death (2018–2023).
Policy-oriented comparison of maternity care across 11 high-income nations, identifying universal paid leave and midwife-led care as the two strongest correlates of lower MMR.
Long-form investigative reporting pairing statistics with named patient stories. Useful for making aggregate numbers legible and for triangulating what official data often misses.