Yay! We're Reviving Childbed Fever! Back to the Future, Part 21
So, among all the other great news lately, there's this: in the two years since Texas banned abortion, rates of deadly sepsis, leading to maternal mortality, have skyrocketed.
Before the twentieth century, "childbed fever" (or "puerperal fever") was the name given to the septic infection that led to many women's deaths: "Before the advent of antiseptic practices—and, later, antibiotics to treat sepsis when it occurred—puerperal fever was almost always fatal. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were between six and nine cases for every 1,000 deliveries, resulting in a death toll during that span of as much as half a million in England alone. Puerperal fever was far and away the most common cause of maternal mortality and was second only to tuberculosis among all causes of death for women of childbearing age."
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Eugène Devéria, La Mort de Jane Seymour, Reine d'Angleterre (1847), |
But now, in one more example of "back to the future," childbed fever is back!
As reported by ProPublica's Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou, and Kavitha Surana, "Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021."
In their analysis of the life-threatening complications faced by pregnant women in Texas, the researchers focused first on rates of sepsis--infection--for women who were hospitalized after losing a pregnancy in the second trimester.
Medical treatment is readily available for women in these circumstances: The standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to offer to empty the uterus, according to leading medical organizations, which can lower the risk of contracting an infection and developing sepsis. If a patient’s water breaks or her cervix opens, that risk rises with every passing hour.
Sepsis can lead to permanent kidney failure, brain damage and dangerous blood clotting. Nationally, it is one of the leading causes of deaths in hospitals.
But in Texas, this medical treatment is now unavailable--doctors and hospitals are unable (or unwilling) to treat women for fear that their treatments will be regarded as an illegal abortion.
And so women are dying. The figures provided by the researchers are stark: In 2021, before the Texas abortion ban took full effect, "67 patients who lost a pregnancy in the second trimester were diagnosed with sepsis--as in the previous years, they accounted for about 3% of the hospitalizations."
But, those numbers have changed dramatically: "In 2022, that number jumped to 90. The following year, it climbed to 99."
Wait. There's more.
ProPublica zoomed out beyond the second trimester to look at deaths of all women hospitalized in Texas while pregnant or up to six weeks postpartum. Deaths peaked amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and most patients who died then were diagnosed with the virus. But looking at the two years before the pandemic, 2018 and 2019, and the two most recent years of data, 2022 and 2023, there is a clear shift:
In the two earlier years, there were 79 maternal hospital deaths.
In the two most recent, there were 120.
This is where we are now--a return not to the twentieth century or even to the nineteenth, but back to the eighteenth century and even earlier. While women have always died of childbed fever--it was recognized by the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates--the number of cases of childbed fever grew after male physicians began to take over childbirth and delivery from midwives and, in particular, when childbirth moved from home to "lying-in" hospitals in the early modern period. As one example, an "epidemic" of childbirth fever was recorded in 1646 at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. (Laura Helmuth's "The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths" is an excellent place to start
reading if you're interested.)
So, you know, who needs all that modern medical treatment. Stuff like up-to-date obstetric care, sanitary practices, and antibiotics. Let's just go with bullshit and misogyny--what's the big deal if a few women die along the way, right?
I've written many entries in this blog noting women who died from childbed fever. Because of the popularity of the Tudors, I'll include a few names here.
Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, is one of the more famous women who died of childbed fever--within two weeks of giving birth to the son that Henry VIII had so longed for, Jane Semour died. Henry VIII's mother,
Elizabeth of York, also died of childbed fever, as did the woman who had been his sixth wife (but managed to survive him).
Katherine Parr died after giving birth to a daughter, whose father, Thomas Seymour, was Jane Seymour's brother.
I don't usually link to Wikipedia pages--not because I don't value the resource a great deal (I donate regularly, and I suggest you do too) but because it's easily accessible to all. But I am going to link
here to the list of notable women who died during childbirth or from complications to childbirth--it's an eye-opener.
But even as I link you to “notable” women, every woman who suffers a terrible, unnecessary complication is notable to us—a beloved daughter, wife, partner, sister, friend, neighbor, even perhaps a mother already. She is a singular human being.
