Wednesday 19 October 2022 11:43 PM Pregnant women in the US are more likely to be MURDERED than die of common ... trends now
Pregnant and post-partum women in the US are more likely to be murdered than to die of leading causes of maternal mortality.
The risk of homicide is higher than death from obstetric complications such as high blood pressure disorders, hemorrhage, and sepsis.
A deadly combination of intimate partner violence and easy access to firearms have caused the majority of these homicides, scientists at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said in a new report out Wednesday.
Pregnant women in America have long been those most vulnerable to domestic violence and murder.
Intimate partner violence is exceedingly common in the US.
About one in three American women have experienced violence of this type and one in seven have been injured by their partners.
Most intimate partner deaths in the US involve firearms.
In fact, recent estimates indicate that firearms were used in 68 per cent of women killed by partners around pregnancy between 2008 and 2019.
Pregnant women are considerably more likely to be killed by their partners than to die due to common pregnancy complications such as becoming septic or hemorrhaging.
The majority of homicides involving pregnant women perpetrated by their partners are carried out using guns. The new study reported that as numbers of firearm homicides increase, gun violence has become a health emergency for pregnant women in the US.
Black women were at substantially higher risk of being murdered by their partners than were Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women.
'With numbers of firearm homicides increasing in the US, gun violence has become a health emergency for pregnant women,' authors of the report said.
