Homicide becomes leading cause of U.S. maternal death: CNN

NEW YORK, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Two researchers are urging health care providers to educate and screen pregnant women about intimate partner violence, as women in the United States are more likely to be murdered during pregnancy or postpartum than to die of common obstetric causes such as high blood pressure, hemorrhage or sepsis, reported CNN on Thursday.

Pregnancy-related homicides are often linked to domestic violence and firearms, but they are preventable, Rebecca Lawn and Karestan Koenen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health wrote in an editorial published in medical journal The BMJ.

Most people tend to think of clinical causes of maternal death, such as preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, but Lawn and Koenen's editorial provides insights into intimate partner violence as another cause, said Zenobia Brown, senior vice president of population health and associate chief medical officer at Northwell Health, a health care network in New York.

A study published in August in the American Journal of Public Health found that pregnancy-associated homicides in the United States have risen substantially in recent years, and the risk of homicide was 35 percent higher for pregnant and postpartum women than for their counterparts who are not pregnant nor postpartum.

Data on maternal deaths related to intimate partner violence is often lacking, but screening can help, said Kamila Alexander, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, noting that Black women are at higher risk of maternal deaths due to homicide than white women and that monitoring those racial disparities is important.