Jordyn Albright’s pregnancy-and-delivery journey was difficult from the start. Her pregnancy was high risk, due to both in vitro fertilization (IVF) and high blood pressure during pregnancy. She was induced three weeks early and went through 60 hours of labor before delivering.
With her son in her arms, the worst should have been behind her. But within moments, her doctor realized her placenta was stuck to her uterine wall. Hospital staff gathered around her, trying to remove the placenta manually — “a horribly painful experience,” Albright, 32, said. She wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Mere minutes after giving birth, Albright passed out from blood loss. What she didn’t hear was her care team calling for a rapid response, which is an alert in labor-and-delivery units that brings an emergency team of doctors and nurses rushing to the room. This team saved Albright’s life with 4 pints of blood (she would later need 2 more) and whisked her to emergency surgery to remove the retained placenta.
This harrowing experience was followed by a traumatic few days in the intensive care unit (ICU) and separation from her newborn. It was compounded by weeks in the neonatal ICU for the new baby, who contracted a rare bacterial infection after birth. But Albright and her husband, Jeffrey Albright, credit their care team with saving both mom and child.
“This could have been so much worse,” Jeffrey Albright, 32, told Live Science. “In any way you can think of it, it could have been worse.”
For too many families, it is worse. A higher percentage of people die in pregnancy, childbirth or the postpartum period in the U.S. than in comparable wealthy countries. It’s a problem of health disparities, access to health care, and how individual hospitals handle emergencies — and the problems could deepen with recent policy decisions in the U.S., experts say.
Despite the bleak numbers, there is hope. Evidence suggests that most of these deaths are preventable and that some relatively straightforward interventions could slash the maternal death rate. Those measures include better prenatal monitoring to prevent emergencies in the first place, as well as more training for hospital personnel to react when emergencies do happen.
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