California Said No More Women Will Bleed To Death In Childbirth. The Results Are Dramatic

Maternal deaths in America are climbing steadily, making us an outlier against the rest of the developed world. The US is only one of 13 countries with maternal death rate increases since 1990. We stand in the company of North Korea and Zimbabwe. 

Between 2000 and 2014, maternal deaths soared by 27 percent to 24 per 100,000 in America.. That rate is three times the rate of the United Kingdom and about eight times that of Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, writes Vox. 

The reasons for steep rises in maternal deaths in America are several. There have been changes in how maternal deaths are reported. Efforts to correct this under-reporting are a minor reason for the current increase. While it's impossible to prove casuality conclusively, the war against Planned Parenthood has closed many women's health clinics, giving poor and middle class women no access to contraception or maternal care. 

The Republican argument that other women's health care centers will take Planned Parenthood patients is just not correct. An apparent majority of these centers don't accept Medicaid and large numbers do not offer contraception, believing that it goes against religious principles. 

Maternal death rates in Texas have soared, making the state the worst in the developed world with a doubling of deaths over a two-year-period. As lawmakers closed Planned Parenthood locations all over the state, the Texas Observer writes that lawmakers could care less if women are dying in pregnancy for lack of medical care. 

AOC is well-versed on this issues, but not the third one in the Vox article: California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth. 

In a normal pregnancy, the placenta develops inside the uterus, attaches to the uterine wall, and then is flushed out of the body after the birth.In a condition called placenta accreta, the placenta grows out of control, similar to a cancer.

In accreta, which doctors believe is most often caused by scarring from prior cesarean sections, the placenta sticks around and embeds. The condition was exceedingly rare in the 1950s, occurring in only one in 30,000 deliveries in the US. Today, because of the rise in C-sections, it shows up in about one in 500 births. One in 14 American women with accreta die, usually from hemorrhaging too much blood.

Read how California has declared war on maternal deaths in programs and procedures spawned as part of Stanford's California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.