FOI REF: FOI/2023/5076
You asked
I would like to enquire about Black maternal mortality rate statistics.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales. This is driven by information collected from death certificate at death registration.
Unfortunately, we do not hold the information you have requested for maternal mortality rates by ethnicity.\ The information we hold on deaths is limited to what is recorded on the death certificate by a doctor or information about the cause and circumstances of the death provided by a coroner. Ethnicity is not recorded on the death certificate.
Ethnicity is self-reported in census data, and we have produced some analysis of COVID-19 deaths by ethnicity previously by linking death registration data to census information. However, we are unfortunately unable to create the information requested using this method, due to the availability of suitable population denominators required to calculate the age standardised mortality rate.
Furthermore, a maternal death is defined internationally as the 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). The information we have does not equate directly to this definition.
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. The latest report covering maternal deaths by ethnicity between 2018 and 2020 can be found here: https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-uk, which may be of interest. Any queries regarding this data should be directed to MBRACE-UK (mbrrace-uk@npeu.ox.ac.uk).