American Dads Can Help Address the Maternal Mortality Crisis

The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy nation, and the toll falls hardest on Black mothers and on rural families far from a delivery room. No party has a monopoly on that grief—or on the urgency to end it. We have each spent years calling attention to this issue and taking steps to address it once and for all. 

In New Jersey, it has meant pairing progress at home with leadership in Washington. For years, Sen. Booker has led the Black Maternal Health Momnibus, the most comprehensive maternal health legislation before Congress: a package of more than a dozen bills that confront every driver of these deaths at once. The legislation would grow and diversify the workforce of doctors, midwives, and doulas. And importantly, it would invest in the community organizations closest to at-risk mothers, strengthen maternal mental-health care, sharpen the data on who is dying and why, and fight to make postpartum Medicaid coverage permanent, so that a mother’s care does not end 60 days after she gives birth.