Jan 9, 2025, 11:46 AM ET

Media tries to cast doubt on Tennessee report showing decline in pregnancy-related deaths

Last month, the Tennessee Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) released its 2024 Maternal Mortality Report for the years 2020-2022, which showed an overall 26% decline in pregnancy-associated deaths and a 15% decrease in pregnancy-related deaths from 2021 to 2022. However, pregnancy-related deaths comprised a larger proportion of all maternal deaths, leading media outlets to question if the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the enactment of the state’s pro-life law were the cause. They weren’t.

All maternal mortality reports include data on pregnancy-associated deaths, which are deaths of pregnant women during or in the year after pregnancy. From within those deaths, maternal mortality committees extract a smaller group of deaths that it deems to be “pregnancy-related” — those that occurred in that same time frame of pregnancy and a year after delivery and are believed to have been caused by a complication with the pregnancy.

Halfway through 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Tennessee’s law protecting most preborn children from abortion went into effect. Despite this, the data shared in the pro-life state’s maternal death report aligns with reports from pro-abortion states — even when it comes to information about which women are more likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy, and about the top causes of maternal death.

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Yet, media critics have complained that the maternal mortality report does not include data on the potential impact of the pro-life law on maternal deaths. However, there are reasons for this that the media simply isn’t telling its readers and viewers. There are many ways to deceive the public; withholding crucial contextual information is one of them.

How Tennessee’s report stacks up against a pro-abortion state’s report

Similar disparities by race and socioeconomic status

According to Tennessee’s report, Black women, unmarried women, underprivileged women, and women in urban areas in the state died at higher rates during pregnancy and in the postpartum year that followed.

In pro-abortion Illinois’ report for 2018-2020, similar findings were noted. That report stated, “We continue to see inequities in maternal mortality for Black women and women with lower socioeconomic status.”

Any media reporting that leads readers to believe that Tennessee’s disparities are due to pro-life laws or that those same disparities are absent in pro-abortion states is dishonest.

Similar leading causes of pregnancy-related death

The latest Tennessee report found that most pregnancy-related deaths from 2020 to 2022 were found to be due to “mental health conditions” including “substance use disorder” (28%). The second leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the state in 2020-2022 was cardiovascular conditions, including cardiomyopathy and preeclampsia/eclampsia (22%). In third place was infection (20%), mostly in relation to COVID-19. That was followed by hemorrhage (11%), thrombotic embolism (5%), and homicide (3%). Most maternal pregnancy-related deaths occurred 43 to 365 days following delivery.

Comparatively, Illinois likewise reported, “The leading cause of pregnancy-related death was substance use disorder, which comprised 32% of pregnancy-related deaths” (but Illinois did not include mental health conditions resulting in suicide in that number, which comprised an additional 8% of the deaths). The other most common causes of pregnancy-related death were cardiac and coronary conditions (14% of deaths), pre-existing chronic medical conditions (12% of deaths), sepsis (9%), and thrombotic embolism (7%). More than half of the maternal deaths in Illinois occurred 60 days or more after delivery.

Increase in “pregnancy-related” deaths due to reclassification of data

Tennessee’s 2024 report states that while pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related deaths decreased, the proportion of pregnancy-associated deaths that were deemed to be pregnancy-related had increased. This was due in part to COVID-19, according to the report, but it was also due to a decision to re-classify and move many of the “substance use” deaths into the “pregnancy-related” category; prior to this, those deaths were listed in the “pregnancy-associated” category.

The report stated that the committee “implemented new criteria for determining pregnancy-relatedness in deaths due to suicide and unintentional overdose” and that “This change led to an increase in deaths from these causes being deemed pregnancy-related.” This artificially inflated the number of deaths that were deemed to be “pregnancy-related” compared to previous years.

The report also noted:

The percentage of pregnancy-associated deaths that were deemed pregnancy-related by the MMRC has increased. Pregnancy-related deaths accounted for 30% of all pregnancy-associated deaths between 2017-2019 versus 43% between 2020-2022. This increase was due in part to COVID-19, which can cause more severe disease during pregnancy. There were 24 pregnancy-related deaths due to COVID-19, only two of which occurred in 2022.

Therefore, when comparing Tennessee’s 2024 maternal mortality review to its 2021 maternal mortality review, it’s important to note that change. The 2021 report lists cardiovascular and coronary conditions as the top leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths with “mental health conditions” as the fourth leading cause. Due to the change in reporting, the 2022 report shows “mental health conditions” as the top cause of maternal death with substance use disorder accounting for a large portion of those deaths. Cardiovascular conditions were the second leading cause of maternal death following the MMRC’s decision to shift substance use to the “pregnancy-related” subset.

Media omits facts, complains report doesn’t include abortion information

Media coverage of the Tennessee MMRC report included an article from Tennessee Lookout, which complained that while the report included the year Roe v. Wade was overturned and Tennessee’s law protecting most preborn children from abortion took effect (2022), it did not include any information on abortion-related deaths or deaths that resulted from the enactment of the pro-life law.

“The report focuses on maternal deaths between 2021 and 2022. The report encompasses the time period in which the state’s abortion ban took effect, but includes no reference to the state’s abortion policy or assessment of whether it played any role in Tennessee’s pregnancy deaths,” it said.

This begs the question: Do states typically report on whether access to abortion or a lack of access to abortion has played a role in maternal mortality?

The answer is no.

Maternal mortality reports have historically not included information on abortion-related deaths (or on deaths that some theorize might have been prevented by abortion).

Though abortion-associated and abortion-related deaths do occur, there is no federal requirement that they be reported and only about half of all states require abortion providers to report complications and deaths. This, of course, isn’t a new development.

Abortion advocates have, for decades, appeared unconcerned at this lack of reporting on abortion complications and deaths from certain pro-abortion states. Now, those same advocates are hypocritically concerned at the lack of reporting on deaths that they expect to occur in states as a result of restricting abortion. They have long portrayed abortion as a ‘lifesaving’ procedure, ignoring the fact that each induced abortion intentionally and directly kills a human being. Those prenatal human deaths by abortion aren’t counted as deaths at all.

The pro-abortion media and the abortion industry have admitted that their goal is to blame pro-life laws for women’s deaths, with one recent news piece admitting that abortion advocates care more about the big picture of abortion on demand than they do about women’s deaths. “There is a widespread opposition and suspicion to seeking compromise or harm reduction with Republicans,” wrote Vox’s Rachel Cohen. “The big gamble strategy instead? Bank on more women dying and the abortion rights agenda growing more salient for voters in years to come” (emphasis added). As ProPublica has demonstrated, if maternal mortality committees refuse to blame pro-life laws for women’s deaths, certain “journalists” will dishonestly do it for them. (Live Action News has debunked much of the mainstream media’s narrative in our “Fact Checks” section.)

Of course, it isn’t just Tennessee that’s taking heat for not including pro-life laws’ impact on maternal deaths.

Texas legislators created the Texas Maternal Mortality Review Committee (TXMMRC) in 2013 and it was determined at that time that the committee would not review cases of maternal death related to abortion. In 2013, abortion was legal in Texas through 20 weeks post-fertilization or 22 weeks LMP. But that didn’t stop the mainstream media from portraying the exclusion of abortion-related deaths by the committee as recent and intentional. The 2013 bipartisan bill stated:

Sec.A34.013.AA INAPPLICABILITY OF CHAPTER. This chapter does not apply to disclosure of records pertaining to voluntary or therapeutic termination of pregnancy, and those records may not be collected, maintained, or disclosed under this chapter.

In other words, pro-abortion Texas legislators were part of the decision not to include abortion-related deaths in that state’s maternal mortality reports. Of course, the media is omitting this detail as well.

Abortion is not a standard of care

Induced abortion — the intentional and direct killing of a preborn child — is not the standard of care for any health condition or any pregnancy complication.

Pro-abortion Illinois’ most recent maternal mortality report from 2021, before the overturn of Roe, revealed that more than 90% of maternal deaths in that state were determined to have been “preventable” despite the availability of abortions (and the skyrocketing number of abortions) in the state. In fact, in 2019, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law making abortion a so-called ‘human right,’ even forcing taxpayers to cover the elective abortion costs for women on state health insurance and Medicaid.

Meanwhile, pro-life Tennessee’s most recent maternal mortality report showing data through 2022 (which included data through the enactment of pro-life laws and the overturn of Roe) determined that 76% of that state’s pregnancy-related deaths were preventable and that half of all contributing factors in pregnant women’s deaths were due doctor error, including “failure to recognize early warning signs of complications.” Pro-abortion Illinois’ report listed similar contributing factors in maternal deaths.

Intentionally killing preborn children through dismemberment or induced cardiac arrest is not necessary to end a pregnancy.

If a pregnancy must end to save the woman’s life, the child can be delivered through induced labor or emergency C-section — both completely legal in every state. If the baby is too young to survive, this emergency delivery is not considered an induced abortion under state pro-life laws, because the child was not intentionally and actively killed.

Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:

Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!

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