FOI Reference: FOI/2021/2906
You asked
I am writing to request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 the following:
1) The number of pregnant women who have died from Covid 19 in the UK to date.
This means a woman who is in any stage of pregnancy, who has died solely from Covid 19 and where Covid 19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate whilst pregnant.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the provision of mortality statistics for England and Wales. National Records Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Therefore, we do not hold the requested data for the whole of the UK. Should you wish to obtain this data from NRS and NISRA, they can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.
Our mortality data comes from the information collected at death registration. All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules. The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:
a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury
Whether a woman was pregnant at the time of her death is not recorded on the death certificate. Therefore, we are unable to answer your request with the information we hold using ONS death registration data.
We only hold deaths registered to women where a pregnancy-related cause is listed on the death certificate and is then coded as the underlying cause (the O codes in the International Classification of Diseases) which can be found in our explorable dataset, NOMIS for 2013 to 2020. You can find this data prior to 2013 in Table 5 of the Deaths registered in England and Wales.
A maternal death is defined internationally as a death of a woman during or up to six weeks (42 days) after the end of pregnancy (whether the pregnancy ended by termination, miscarriage or a birth, or was an ectopic pregnancy) through causes associated with, or exacerbated by, pregnancy (World Health Organisation 2010).
To provide data to meet this definition, the MBRRACE-UK programme of work is responsible for the national Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths (CEMD) within the United Kingdom. Latest report is available here. This is your best source of data on maternal deaths and any queries should be directed to MBRACE-UK (mbrrace-uk@npeu.ox.ac.uk).