Pregnancy greater risk to minority women?

Question

"Black women have the highest mortality rates at 30 deaths per 100,000 live births, but the rate for Native American/Alaskan natives is 12.2, for Asian and Pacific Islanders it is 11.3, and for Hispanics it is 10.3. Anglo women die from pregnancy-related complications at a rate of 7.3 deaths per 100,000 live births. The risk for Hispanic and Asian women was greater for those born outside the United States."

What would be the reasons for the difference in risk during pregnancy vs race?

Is there something we can do about it?

Answer 1

There are many factors when it comes to death due to pregnancies, which is something rare. It might be due to financial means, genes [some races are sinsitive to certain stuff or don't have a certain bioligical thing [scientific words, i know!]] and so on...It's very odd the other day I read the the odds for an Asian woman to die during/after a pregnancy is lower then lighting stricking twice in the same place. That is a very intersiting question.

Answer 2

It has nothing to do with race and EVERYTHING to do with CLASS.

Higher class means better health care. I could answer this question in my sleep.

Answer 3

Some differences are probably access to medical care and being grossly overweight.

Answer 4

"African American women are more likely to die from ectopic pregnancies, when the fetus develops outside of the uterus (womb), and preeclampsia, which is a combination of high blood pressure, fluid retention, and protein loss in the urine. African American women are also more likely to leak amniotic fluids during pregnancy, which can lead to infection.

We do not know for sure why African American women have such high rates of pregnancy-related death. One study from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that limited access to health care may be one reason, noting that pregnant African American women were more than twice as likely as white women to get late or no prenatal care. Most of the women in the study said they wanted earlier prenatal care, but they could not get it because of a lack of money or insurance or not being able to get an appointment."

http://www.4woman.gov/minority/africanam...

"Alaska has not made progress toward achieving the HP2010 goals for early or adequate prenatal care — both of these measures remain well below the 90% target. While the national scores are low (84.1% for early care; 74.6% for adequate care), prenatal care in the first trimester was even lower among Alaskan women (80.1%) and adequate care was significantly lower for Alaskans (58.3%). Analysis of Alaska Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) data indicated that 1 in 5 Alaskan women did not get prenatal care as early in their pregnancies as they wanted. Among these women, nearly 30% did not know they were pregnant or were unable to get an appointment earlier. Another common reason was lack of funds or insurance."

http://www.4woman.gov/OWH/reg/10/

"Mothers born outside of the U.S. are significantly more likely to have diabetes during pregnancy. The impact of maternal nativity on diabetes prevalence is largely explained by the older childbearing age of immigrant mothers. However, adjusted diabetes risk remains elevated for Asian-Indian, non-Hispanic black, Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Central and South American mothers who were born outside the U.S. Conversely, birthplace outside the U.S. significantly reduces diabetes risk for Japanese, Mexican, and Native American women."

http://www.sawnet.org/health/diabetes_ab...

I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that in order to remedy the situation socio-economic boundaries must be broken, the language barriors overcome, there should further studies on health issues specific to certain ethnicities, health care would need to be made easily accessable,  and better access to prior health records must be provided.