Why Even Maternal Health Experts Aren’t Safe from America’s Birth Crisis
Janell Green Smith spent her career caring for others. A certified nurse-midwife and scholar based in Charleston, South Carolina, who dedicated herself to healing, she understood the vulnerabilities of the human body better than most.
The 31-year-old, who proudly called herself the “Loc’d Midwife,” had delivered more than 200 babies and trained the next generation of midwives at a community birth center. She had earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree in 2024, just two years after becoming a certified midwife in 2021.
Yet when she gave birth to her first child early this month, that expertise couldn’t save her. Ms. Smith died from complications of childbirth, her death a stark reminder that, in America, even medical professionals who specialize in maternal health aren’t immune to a crisis that has made headlines nationwide; though the truth of that crisis may be more complex than it appears.
The numbers paint a disturbing picture. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the maternal mortality rate in the United States nearly doubled to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021 from 17.4 deaths in 2018.
The World Health Organization declared the United States one of only seven countries worldwide to report a significant increase in maternal deaths since 2000, placing America alongside Venezuela, Cyprus, Greece, Mauritius, Belize and the Dominican Republic.
Yet beneath these alarming statistics lies a tangled story of measurement changes, data collection challenges, racial disparities and genuine health crises that make answering a simple question remarkably complex: Is maternal mortality actually rising in America, or are we counting deaths differently than we did two decades ago?
