Before the pandemic, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate among affluent nations, reflecting a multitude of systemic problems, from racial disparities in medical treatment and outcomes to high rates of chronic disease among people of child-bearing age to a lack of access to postpartum healthcare for many new mothers.

Since the arrival of COVID-19, the rate of maternal death for women aged 15 to 44 in the U.S. has only gotten worse, new data shows, rising from a rate of nearly 29 maternal deaths per 100,000 births in 2019 to 45.6 in 2021. 

Despite the availability of COVID vaccines and a nationwide push to bolster the health of new mothers, the rate of maternal mortality in 2022 will almost assuredly end up at the same level or higher than pre-pandemic 2019, according to our analysis.

By most available metrics, maternal health in the United States worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. To share the latest 2022 figures and the best available data from a selection of states, MuckRock has compiled the following repository of U.S. maternal mortality data. It relies on two types of sources: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, covering January 2018 through December 2022, encompassing 6,193 pregnancy-related deaths nationwide; and death records from Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina, covering calendar years 2020, 2021 and provisional data from 2022, comprising 607 pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related deaths. Explore the data and our methodology in our GitHub repository below.

• March 11th, 4:40 -5:35pm Central Time at FOIA Fest (in-person and virtual) we'll be demoing Transparency Tools with open source fellow Sanjin along with WBEZ’s Matt Kiefer and NewsNation’s Mary Hall.

  Get hands-on training in various tools, including MuckRock's DocumentCloud platform and other open-source resources. Plus, explore AI and try out ChatGPT, from writing the FOIAs to generating specific ones.

• March 14: 1pm Eastern: Cracking Puerto Rico’s Financial Secrecy with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo’s Carla Minet, Carlos Ramos and MuckRock’s André Natta.

  Join us for a one-hour session to hear how Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) used a mix of litigation, automation and old-fashioned reporting work to bring together, for the first time, over 20,000 previously secret documents that showed the operations of Puerto Rico’s secretive financial control board. CPI’s Carla Minet and Carlos Ramos will share how they used DocumentCloud to consolidate and permanently archive the records as part of an inaugural Gateway Grant, as well as share lessons you can apply to your own work.

• March 15, 1pm Eastern: FOIA 101: A Public Records Primer for Everyone with Kiera Murray and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of SPJ’s FOI Committee.

  Never filed a FOIA or public records request but ready to give it a go? Have burning transparency questions, but you’re too afraid to ask? Join us on March 15 at 1pm Eastern for a joint FOIA training with the Society of Professional Journalists and MuckRock, where we’ll walk through the basics of what you need to know about public records as well as strategies that even veterans will find useful to upping their FOIA game. MuckRock’s Kiera Murray will share tips and tricks she’s gleaned from helping thousands of requesters as well as leading some of the largest public records campaigns ever, with a special introduction from Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, Society of Professional Journalists board member and FOIA chair.

• March 16 at 1pm Eastern: Air Quality Access with Dillon and Anthony Moser

  Ever wonder how bad the air actually is on those smoggy days? Wish you knew the impact of that proposal for a new distribution center on your family’s health or how your local government is ticketing polluters who break the law?

  Join us for a special Sunshine Week training on how you can use public records requests and other data sources to get answers about what’s in your air. Building on our collaborative reporting on Chicago’s air quality and our guides to environmental records requests, MuckRock reporter Dillon Bergin shares practical request ideas you can file immediately that help assess local risks, identify potential polluters and look at how your government is or isn’t responding. Bergin will be joined by Anthony Moser, folk technologist and member of Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ), to talk about Ineffective By Choice: A Review of Environmental Enforcement Data in Chicago 2002-2022, and how N4EJ received two decades of previously unpublished data from the Dept of Administrative Hearings, analyzed it, and put it in context with inspection reports, CDPH emails and other documents obtained through FOIA.

• March 16, 1 p.m. Eastern: Supercharging Accountability Reporting with MuckRock and DocumentCloud at the NC Local News & Information Summit with André Natta

  Digging through public records can be intimidating, especially for small newsrooms. Join this session to test drive MuckRock’s public records tools and DocumentCloud’s new Add-Ons library. Learn how powerful web scrapers, table extraction tools and machine learning models can supercharge and streamline your reporting.

The March 17 deadline is approaching for our next round of Gateway Grants, a program that provides funding and technical support to document-driven reporting, civic engagement efforts and other projects that put DocumentCloud to work to help gather, analyze and publish critical documents for the public.

Apply today, and if you missed it you can check out our informational session for more details and background.

For The Record was written by Michael Morisy.