What Do Current Maternal Mortality Statistics Reveal About Racial Disparities in the United States?
Question
What do current maternal mortality statistics reveal about racial disparities in the United States?
Answer
The patterns across populations are stark and the empirical heart of this course. In 2023, the overall United States maternal mortality rate was 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, a decline from 22.3 in 2022, with 669 maternal deaths recorded in 2023 compared with 817 in 2022 (Hoyert, 2025). That overall improvement, however, masks a persistent and severe racial disparity. In 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 per 100,000 live births, while the rates for White, Hispanic, and Asian women were 14.5, 12.4, and 10.7 per 100,000, respectively (Hoyert, 2025). The Black rate was more than three times the White rate and more than four and a half times the lowest group rate. While rates declined significantly for White and Hispanic women between 2022 and 2023, the rate for Black women did not improve and remained the highest by a wide margin (Hoyert, 2025). It is worth pausing on what these numbers represent. A rate of 50.3 per 100,000 is not an abstraction; it means that the everyday experience of pregnancy and birth carries a categorically different level of danger for Black women in the United States than for their White, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts, and that this has remained true even as the overall picture improved.
American Indian and Alaska Native populations require specific attention, both because the relevant learning outcome names them and because the standard reporting can render them invisible. National vital statistics typically report stable rates only for the largest race and Hispanic-origin groups, and for 2023, the data were insufficient to publish a reliable maternal mortality rate for American Indian and Alaska Native and for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander populations (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2025). This statistical suppression is itself a manifestation of how systems can obscure the populations at highest risk, since small population counts lead to fewer cells being detected, and the groups most affected become the hardest to see in the headline figures. Earlier data make the stakes clear: in 2021, American Indian and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander people had pregnancy-related mortality rates of 118.7 and 111.7 per 100,000, respectively, the highest of any groups (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2025).
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt is presented by Calista Kelly, PT, DPT, ACEEAA, Cert. MDT.
Calista Kelly
PT, DPT, ACEEAA, Cert. MDT
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