The Burden of Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in the United States and Worldwide

Abstract:

There is an extensive literature exploring maternal mortality and morbidity in the United States and worldwide in terms of epidemiology, etiologies, clinical associations, and preventability. A particularly novel approach to this subject, however, concerns the burden that both maternal mortality and morbidity represent. Although various studies use the word burden in their titles, it is used as a descriptive or metamorphical term. Looking upon both mortality and morbidity as burdens is akin to a stone falling into a still pond, with the mother at the epicenter and the ripples emanating outward to affect her partner, children, and family, as well as the physician, hospital, scientific community, society as a whole, and in cases of morbidity, back to the mother herself for years after the inciting event. From the perspective of these parties, the impact felt is individual to each, whether it is on an economic, medical/psychological, developmental, medicolegal, or macrostructural level. Although the individual prevalences of maternal mortality and severe morbidity are low enough especially in developed countries to not be considered significant problems, the total prevalent burden they can and do represent along with minor morbidity is on a much grander scale, and not well-represented in the literature. It is in this light that efforts to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity become especially laudable.