HOUSTON — We love mothers, or at least we say we do, and we claim that motherhood is as American as apple pie.
We’re lying. In fact, we’ve structured health care so that motherhood is far more deadly in the United States than in other advanced countries. An American woman is about five times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a British woman — partly because Britain makes a determined effort to save mothers’ lives, and we don’t.
Here in Texas, women die from pregnancy at a rate almost unrivaled in the industrialized world. A woman in Texas is about 10 times as likely to die from pregnancy as one in Spain or Sweden, and by all accounts, the health care plans proposed so far by Republicans would make maternal mortality even worse in Texas and across America.
Women die unnecessarily in Texas for many reasons, but it doesn’t help that some women’s health clinics have closed and that access to Medicaid is difficult.
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