The vast majority of New Mexico’s pregnancy-related deaths in a recent six-year period were preventable, according to a report presented Monday to state lawmakers.
The report, which used data collected from 2018 to 2023 by the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, showed 74 New Mexicans died from pregnancy-related complications within a year of giving birth. About 97% of those deaths could have been prevented, according to data from the panel, which is housed within the New Mexico Department of Health and is tasked with analyzing and determining the causes of pregnancy-related deaths in the state.
The report indicates the state’s pregnancy-related mortality rate has decreased from its pandemic-era peak, but remains higher than the national average.
Of particular concern, the report found more than 40% of pregnancy-related deaths were caused by underlying behavioral health issues, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse. Other leading causes of pregnancy-related death included infection, heart disease and hemorrhage, according to the report, which was presented to members of the Legislative Health and Human Services Committee.
Sen. Linda López, an Albuquerque Democrat, said the report should serve as a guide for New Mexico policymakers as they attempt to address the problem.
“I think this really is a directive for us to look and see what we can do … in supporting persons who are pregnant,” López said.
Recent years have brought spikes and troughs in rates of pregnancy-related deaths, the review committee’s report shows. In 2019, only about 13 in 100,000 births in the state resulted in the mother’s death within one year of pregnancy. In 2021, that figure had jumped to a rate of nearly 150 per 100,000 births, as the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the state.
The pandemic greatly exacerbated racial and geographic disparities in pregnancy-related deaths, the report shows. American Indian and Alaska Native women died from pregnancy-related causes at rates more than double the state average in 2021, as COVID-19 devastated Indigenous communities.
With the Navajo Nation among the hardest-hit per capita by COVID-19 infections, the northwestern region of New Mexico was home to about 10% of the state’s births between 2018 and 2023, but nearly 30% of the state’s pregnancy-related deaths.
Maternal mortality rates in New Mexico have dropped since the peak of the pandemic. The rate of pregnancy-related deaths decreased four-fold between 2021 and 2023, to about 24 per 100,000 live births in the latter year, the report states.
The report shows racial and ethnic disparities have flattened out, too, with Native women dying from pregnancy-related causes at rates below their white and Hispanic peers in 2023.
However, rates of pregnancy-related death were higher among rural New Mexicans from 2018 through 2023, Kevin Peine, executive director of the Centers for Public Health at the New Mexico Department of Health, told lawmakers.
“If we look at the sort of births in Albuquerque compared to the number of births in rural portion of the state, it is a kind of disproportionate percentage of the deaths coming from our more rural areas,” Peine said.
Pregnancy was also far more dangerous for parents who received little to no prenatal care, the report shows. Women who received no or unknown prenatal care died at a rate of 326 per 100,000 births, nearly 10 times higher than the rate for women who started receiving prenatal care in their first trimester of pregnancy.
A significant portion of the deaths — 46% — occurred during the “late postpartum period,” or from 43 to 365 days after birth, said New Mexico Department of Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Miranda Durham.
As a result of the data, the Maternal Mortality Review Committee recommended policy changes aimed at better supporting families during and after pregnancy. The report calls for timely and ongoing postpartum care; expanded access to community-, home- and mobile-based care; improving referral pathways between providers; and implementing tools to screen for depression as well as the social and economic drivers of health, like unemployment and homelessness.
“[These] 97.3% of pregnancy-related deaths were determined by the committee to be preventable — some of them with big fixes and some of them with smaller fixes,” Durham said.
