"
Think of it--the needless deaths of 15,000 women a "great
underestimate"! Yet even this number means that virtually every hour
of the day and night two women die as the result of childbirth in the
healthiest and supposedly the most progressive country in the world.
It is apparent that Dr. Meigs leaves out of consideration the many
thousands of deaths each year of women who become pregnant while
suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, addressing the
forty-fourth annual convention of the American Public Health
Association, in Cincinnati in 1916, called attention to the fact that
some authors hold that "65 per cent of the women afflicted with
tuberculosis, even when afflicted only in the relatively early and
curable stages, die as the result of pregnancy which could have been
avoided and their lives saved had they but known some means of
prevention." Nor were syphilis, various kidney and heart disorders and
other diseases, often rendered fatal by pregnancy, taken into account
by Dr. Meigs' survey.
Still, leaving out all the hundreds of thousands of women who die
because pregnancy has complicated serious diseases, Dr. Meigs finds
that "in 1913, the death rate per 100,000 of the population from all
conditions caused by childbirth was little lower than that from
typhoid fever.
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