Most women are familiar with the persistent threat of intimate partner violence, a sociopolitical crisis that limits the freedoms and safety of women and young girls worldwide. However, a recent New York Times investigation highlighted just how insidious and daunting domestic violence is. What was veiled behind data limitations and buried in larger statistics about maternal mortality has now been exposed as murder being the second highest cause of death for pregnant women in the US.

Pregnant and postpartum women are more likely to be murdered than to die from obstetric causes, such as pre-eclampsia, haemorrhage, blood clots, sepsis, high blood pressure, or any type of infection.

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According to data compiled by the New York Times, murder is also more likely to be the cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women than motor vehicle accidents, fires, drowning, and cancer. It is only overtaken by an accidental overdose, which is currently the leading cause of unnatural deaths for this demographic.

Laws that restrict women’s access to reproductive care and abortion were found to increase the risk of homicide.

Roughly two-thirds of the fatal wounds were incurred in the home, and most involved firearms as the means to cause injury, tying into the US’ gun violence epidemic.

In 2020, the murder rate for pregnant or postpartum women was 5.23 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 3.87 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-pregnant and non-postpartum women, as recorded by the National Library of Medicine in the US. The rise in the statistics is likely due to changes in recordkeeping; the gradual rollout of a pregnancy checkbox on death certificates made the reported maternal mortality rate increase, visibilising deaths through murder more greatly.

Still, even before these changes research from single cities, states, and subnational geographies has identified homicide as a leading cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period for decades.

The lack of comprehensive research is mainly related to the fact that homicides aren’t seen as directly related to pregnancies. Yet, considering that a husband, boyfriend, family member, or ex-partner is usually the perpetrator, maternal homicides are part of a broader gender-based violence issue that should not be overlooked or discounted in records about women’s deaths.

This underscores how a critical aspect of the maternal health and safety crisis has been disregarded, with systemic failures to address intimate partner abuse as a major contributor to maternal mortality.

The investigation and previous research also show that Black women are at a significantly higher risk of murder during pregnancy. The same is also true for Hispanic women or non-white women across other racial and ethnic subgroups.

Younger women were also listed as being more greatly impacted by murder during pregnancies. According to The Times, women under 25 face double the risk of being murdered compared to non-pregnant women.

National-level data on the phenomenon is difficult to find, as it’s often buried in individual state reports on maternal mortality, highlighting the need for a unified, nationwide approach for tracking and addressing maternal homicides, rather than leaving it to researchers and journalists to combine and track the data.