Pandemic Challenges Are 'A Crisis Upon A Crisis' For Maternal Health

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the healthcare system in the U.S. while simultaneously taking a disproportionate toll on pregnant and birthing people. Whether its healthcare disruption, anxieties about how to give birth in hospitals that are in triage mode to marginalized demographics facing higher risks, the last year has shed a great deal of light on the maternal health crisis that has been going on the United States for decades and what the addition of a new threat — like a virus that can lead to severe illness in pregnant people, per the World Health Organization (WHO)— can mean for these already troubling outcomes.

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