How Doulas and Midwives Can Help Combat the Racial Biases of Western Medicine 0 Shares American mothers die in childbirth at a greater rate than mothers in all other "developed" countries — three times more than in Britain and Canada, for instance, according to a 2018 report by NPR and ProPublica. Additionally, for every woman who dies during labor in the US, at least 70 experience complications that bring them close to death. In other words, a mother quite literally puts her whole existence on the line anytime she tries to bring life into the world. Peter Bernstein, MD, MPH, program director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women's Health Maternal Fetal Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and chair of The Council on Patient Safety in Women's Health Care, outlines some of the risks and hazards associated with childbirth in that same NPR report: "Women can wind up losing their uterus and therefore becoming infertile. They can wind up with kidney problems. They can have heart attacks. They can have brain damage from all the blood that they've lost. So there can be permanent physical consequences." Other life-threatening complications include blood clots, pregnancy-induced high blood pressure, infections, heart conditions, and hemorrhage.