The Killing of Young Mothers [View all]

[Coventina]

*snip*

(Omitted is a brief account of a young woman who is murdered by her child's father.)

In Louisiana, where Markitha Sinegal lived, homicide is the second leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women. Only drug overdoses take more lives.

This data comes from Louisiana’s Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review Committee, one of many created in the United States in recent years to study the causes of maternal mortality, which has ticked upward over the past two decades. Though the rise in the statistics is most likely because of a change in recordkeeping — with the gradual rollout of a pregnancy checkbox on death certificates making the reported maternal mortality rate increase — the deaths are real. We simply weren’t seeing them this way before.

Homicide deaths are usually omitted from maternal mortality statistics because they aren’t considered sufficiently related to the pregnancy itself. But homicide isn’t a rare anomaly for pregnant and postpartum women — it’s one of their leading causes of death. This makes pregnancy-associated homicides, as they’re called by epidemiologists and health researchers, a real public health concern.

A young woman’s elevated risk of homicide during and after pregnancy holds true whether she is white, Black or Hispanic, but young Black mothers are afflicted by much higher rates of lethal violence.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/09/opinion/pregnant-women-homicide.html

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The war on women continues.....

Where are the good men working to end this?