Political Ideology Direction of Policy Agendas and Maternal Mortality Outcomes in the U.S., 1915–2007

The causes for persistently high and increasing maternal mortality rates in the United States have been elusive.

We use the shift in the ideological direction of the Republican and the Democratic parties in the 1960s, to test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific maternal mortality rates (MMR) follow the power shifts between the parties before and after the Political Realignment (PR) of the 1960s.

Using time-series data analysis methods, we find that, net of trend, overall and race-specific MMRs were higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones before the PR (1915–1965)—i.e., when the Democratic Party was a protector of the Jim Crow system. This pattern, however, changed after the PR (1966–2007), with Republican administrations underperforming Democratic ones—i.e., during the period when the Republican Party shifted toward a more economically and socially conservative agenda. The pre-post PR partisan shifts in MMRs were larger for Black (9.5%, \(p<.01\) $p<.01$ ) relative to White mothers (7.4%, \(p<.05\) $p<.05$ ) during the study period.

These findings imply that parties and the ideological direction of their agendas substantively affect the social determinants of maternal health and produce politized health outcomes.