Bill O’Brien claims CDC exploits maternal mortality data to get more funding, then disproves it.
In a long, snarky social media post, former state House Speaker Bill O’Brien accuses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of manipulating data in an “effort to convince us that the tragedy of Maternal Mortality is a much worse in the United States than elsewhere and a growing problem.”
The reason, O’Brien claims, is so the CDC bureaucrats “who feed at the public trough” can obtain more funding. “With those reported statistics, who would deny them?” he asked.
O’Brien claims the CDC counts maternal deaths as pregnancy-related for a much longer period following birth than other countries. “Unlike the rest of the world however ‘recently been pregnant’ to the CDC is not the universal standard of 42 days of death,” he wrote. “Rather, it is whether the person was pregnant [within] 365 days of death.”
“So what has happened?” O'Brien asked. “Well, over time the rest of the developed world is looking better as medical advances save mothers’ lives. And by contrast, the US is looking historically and relatively bad, because we identify deaths over almost nine times the length of time following pregnancy and then make the comparison.“
According to O’Brien, it’s all a scheme by CDC bureaucrats to get more funding. “What you might not expect – but should – is that the bureaucratic empire builders will not just tug at the heart strings, but they also will tug at the truth to get more funding.”
To back-up his assertion, O’Brien cited an article in Scientific American titled, “Has Maternal Mortality Really Doubled in the U.S.?” The piece, written by the journal’s associate editor for health and medicine, does cast doubt on the claim of a sharp increase in maternal mortality – but gives CDC credit for explaining the statistical circumstances that produced the data rather than creating or exploiting them.
As O’Brien noted in his post, the U.S. began switching over to a new death certificate form in 2003. This form added a dedicated question to determine if a woman was pregnant at the time of death, within 42 days of death or within the past year:
In 2014, researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (rather than the CDC) sounded the alarm with a study indicating American maternal mortality had increased sharply over the past decade.
As the Scientific American article states, the CDC’s chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch responded by urging caution. It “is almost certainly not a real increase” in maternal mortality, he explained. “It’s better detection from the new certificates. The numbers are going up but it’s most likely not because women are more likely to die,” he said.
Furthermore, the Scientific American piece explicitly counters O’Brien’s assertion that the CDC manipulated the data by extending the period considered a pregnancy-related death to a full year following birth. The article notes that the CDC “counts maternal mortality as death during pregnancy or in the following 42 days; some other researchers look at the whole year after giving birth.”
We give O’Brien’s attempt to demonize the CDC a 4-Pinocchio Pants on Fire.