Deaths of Women During or Shortly After Birth Fell in 2024: CDC

Deaths of women during birth or not long after have dropped again, according to government data released on March 4.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on March 4 that in 2024, 649 women died during or shortly after birth, for a rate of 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births.

That was down from the 669 maternal deaths and the rate of 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023.

Maternal mortality covers deaths of women while pregnant or “within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.”

The data come from death certificates.

Maternal deaths spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting 861 in 2020, 1,205 in 2021, and 817 in 2022.

They have since dropped to levels similar to those recorded prior to the pandemic.

Eugene Declercq, a Boston University researcher who studies federal data, said the declines are “welcome, but they are small and only bring us back to where we were six years ago,” before the surge during the pandemic.

The waning of COVID-19 was a major reason for the declines in deaths since 2021, Declercq said. Some of the improvements may also reflect successful efforts to improve care, he added.

Provisional data for 2025 indicate the decline continued, but Declercq said the final numbers could change due to factors such as late death records arriving.

“All you could reasonably say is that the provisional 2025 data look promising,” he said.

The CDC’s new report only provided maternal mortality data. It did not detail the causes of the deaths or outline why CDC employees think the deaths are dropping.

The leading causes of maternal death include heart disease, bleeding, and infection.

The CDC does not count suicides, homicides, or deaths due to accidental causes as maternal deaths, even if the deaths appear related to pregnancy.

Researchers with Columbia University reported in February that they analyzed data on deaths among pregnant women and women who had delivered a baby up to 42 days prior and counted 1,152 deaths from drug overdose, as well as nearly 1,000 others that were not counted as maternal deaths by the CDC.

“These findings indicate that obstetrical complications are no longer the leading causes of maternal death,” they wrote in a letter published by the New England Journal of Medicine. “Homicide, suicide, and drug overdose accounted for more than one fourth of maternal deaths … from 2018 through 2023; deaths from these causes nearly equaled the combined toll of cardiovascular disease, infection, hypertension, and hemorrhage.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.