Mississippi Has Highest Rate Of Pregnancy-Associated Homicides

When epidemiologist Maeve Wallace of the University of Arizona first began publishing national data on pregnancy-associated homicide and suicide nine years ago, she knew that more granular numbers would be essential to effective prevention. In February, they published a landmark study calculating pregnancy-associated violence by state, which suggests a strong connection to firearm legislation and reproductive protocols.  “I think the vast variation that we see across states in terms of their health outcomes, especially maternal mortality or pregnancy-associated death, speaks to the difference in policy,” said Wallace, reports The Trace. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to use nationally available data to calculate state-specific rates of pregnancy-associated violence, or violence during pregnancy and up to one year postpartum. The researchers analyzed violent and substance-related pregnancy deaths between 2018 to 2022.

Mississippi, which has one of the nation's highest rates of obstetric-related complications, had the highest maternal death ratio by firearm in the United States, with 13.42 deaths per 100,000 births.  “If it were entirely due to biological factors, we wouldn’t see any state-level differences, so we know for sure, it’s something beyond biology,” said Jaquelyn Jahn, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University and an author of the study. “How can the maternal care environment differ so much; how do the policy environments differ; how do the histories differ, which could all potentially affect whether pregnant people in those states live or die.” After Mississippi, the study showed Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, Colorado, Louisiana, and North Carolina all had the highest ratios of pregnancy-associated firearm violence. Of those six states, all had some form of permitted open-carry laws. Each state, besides Colorado, also had some form of an abortion ban at the time the data was collected, with Mississippi and Louisiana being the most restrictive. Studies have found that states with more restrictive reproductive policies have higher rates of pregnancy-associated violence and an increased likelihood of interpersonal violence among pregnant patients.