I. Maternal & Infant Mortality
CDC Racial Disparities in Maternal & Infant Mortality
Black maternal mortality: 49.5 per 100K. Black infant mortality: double the national rate.
Black women face 49.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 (2.6x white women, nearly 50x Norway). Black infant mortality: 10.97 per 1,000, more than double the national average.
The CDC tracks maternal and infant mortality by race using the same vital records that produce the headline national numbers. The disparities are extreme and have been for as long as the data has been collected.
Black women in the US die at 49.5 per 100,000 live births, roughly 2.6 times the rate for white women and nearly 50 times the rate for women in Norway. Black infants die at 10.97 per 1,000, more than double the national average of 5.1.
What is striking, and what makes this hard to dismiss as a poverty story, is that the gaps persist after controlling for income, education, and access to prenatal care. Affluent and college-educated Black women still face rates that look closer to developing-world numbers. Studies in JAMA and the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology have documented that Black women receive less pain medication, are less likely to be believed about symptoms, and report being ignored by providers more often than other groups.
49.5
Black maternal mortality per 100K
2.6x
Black vs white US rate
10.97
Black infant mortality per 1,000
~50x
Black US vs Norwegian women
Why it matters
The standard poverty explanation does not account for this. Something about the care itself is producing the gap, and the published research increasingly points at how Black women are treated inside the room.
This is one finding from the research library behind How to Birth a Mother. Everything here traces back to a study, a dataset, or a systematic review.