that was making a big deal out of pregnant women being at higher risk for death via domestic violence as a result of being pregnant. This correlation argument fell apart under examination by Slate Magazine.
Is the correlation in this current article regarding the mortality threats to pregnant black women really telling us that black women are at greater risk of getting killed because of pregnancy, or merely that they are at greater risk of death generally, and some of them just happen to be pregnant?
Basically this study proved that all kinds of weird statistics live out at the end of a bell curve. “Pregnancy associated injury deaths” is a negligible cause of deaths - the study found that about two hundred pregnant or recently pregnant women die from injuries each year and about five pregnant or recently pregnant women are murdered each month (US statistics). With numbers that small, each individual datum will have a noticable effect on the results.
I remember reading the article in The Washington Post about murders of pregnant women, and it said nothing whatsoever about the rate being particularly high among black pregnant women. The MSNBC article added that statement. The article in The Washington Post was about pregnant women of all races. Being “overweight, on a poor diet and often on their second or third child,” is irrelevant in any case, since it wasn’t talking about deaths from natural causes but about murders.
Frankly, I’m not that impressed with Slate’s arguments – which also makes all sorts of unwarranted assumptions, and which is disagreeably callous regarding a sensitive issue.
The incidence of physical abuse by an “intimate” is hard to measure. Some studies claim that up to 2/3 of women are abused during their lives. I find this very hard to believe, such studies use a definition of abuse that I feel trivializes the more serious cases; and since serious spousal abuse is indeed commonplace (I see evidence of it frequently in my emergency room), I think “overpoliticizing” a serious issue does more harm than good.
It’s hard to measure the incidence of spousal abuse. I don’t think the original study is negligent in not coming up with harder numbers, and I think the Salte article makes all sorts of unwarranted assumptions regarding its numbers. The social, psychological and legal barriers against reporting abuse are indeed large. I do believe hundreds of thousands of cases are never reported due to realistic fears victims have that they will be disbelieved, discredited, exposed to further danger, believe they are deserving of abuse, believe (rightly or wrongly) that the benefits of their situation outweight the problem of abuse or that reporting will cause further problems without leading to resolution. With all sorts of reasons not to report, I have no doubt the official numbers are indeed low.
Abuse is clearly more common during pregnancy – pregnancy can be an extremely touchy issue, not all pregnancies are wanted, up to 10% of them may involve different biological and “familial” father, depending on the community. Pregnant women are indeed much more fragile than non-pregnant and less tolerant of trauma and abuse. The argument that the numbers are small compared to other causes of death is not negligible; it is a significant percentage of peripartum death. I’ve seen plenty of pregnant women who claim to have been abused. Should I stop looking for evidence of abuse in pregnant women who present to my ER because the numbers in Maryland may be overblown?
A third of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Biological factors play a large role, but it hardly seems crazy to speculate that some of these miscarriages are due to abuse.
Regarding the article in more detail:
I doubt many moms bought body armor after reading the article. What a brilliant way to try to bring some levity into a serious topic :rolleyes:
Using a 365 day window isn’t unreasonable. Someone with problems during delivery may well die of infection, kidney failure, etc. several months after a (presumed) operation for a pregnancy that went badly. Abuse is commonplace as well after the baby is born, mom stops working, family income goes down… some families do indeed find this a stressful time, and some dads can’t handle not sleeping through the night during the first year. This should have been mentioned in the Post article, but I don’t find Slate’s dismissal of this credible either.
If 10% of women are pregnant, say, and 10% of homicides are in women are pregnant or recently pregnant, Slate suggests pregnant women are murdered less often than that 10%, and that pregnant women are murdered less often than non-pregnant women. These points are obvious, if one buys the figures, we already know 90% of homicides in women were not recently pregnant. Not all these homicides were drive by shootings of unknown strangers. The reason for the murder is significant, as is the fact if the death was secondary to abuse of a pregnant women. What this does not rpove is whether pregancy is a risk factor for abuse (well documented) or murder.
Slate does not address what percent of miscarriages were secondary to abuse. If one third of peripartum maternal deaths were due to homicide, that is an awfully significant number to an obstetrician.
But we’re talking homicide here, you say, not abuse. Agreed. I still say in a contentious issue like this numbers are underreported and I agree with JAMA it is likely more commonplace than statistics suggest. The Slate “rebuttal” doesn’t make me think otherwise. I don’t know about the racial angle.
This story ran on the local news sans any race. The story was a nothing story ultimately showing that (a) stats on pregnant women murders are not well kept and (b) the odds were the same as any other woman. What a made-up piece of spin sure ot become an urban legend. - Jinx :mad:
I guess we should be glad this story got the spin it did. With a little statistical hokey-pokey, I bet I could “prove” that women who’ve had an abortion recently are more likely to be murdered. Remember it’s “lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
> Physical condition and health contribute to the ability to be murdered.
Oh, come on. Most of these murders reported on in the article in The Washington Post were by gunshot. You take a bullet in the head, you’re going to die no matter how healthy you are. Furthermore, these were deliberate murders, not cases of abuse where a husband or a boyfriend hit his wife or girlfriend harder than he thought and she died. I read the descriptions of the murders given in the article and they were nearly all cases where the husband/boyfriend decided, days or weeks in advance, to get rid of the wife/girlfriend because she insisted on having the baby.