The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill last week related to the Maternal Health Accountability Act of 2017, bipartisan legislation cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) that seeks to address the high rate of maternal deaths in the United States.
The Senate-approved Preventing Maternal Deaths Act of 2018, H.R. 1318, is a companion bill to Sen. Capito’s S. 1112, which she introduced with U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) in May 2017 to fight the increasing rates of maternal mortality in the United States. H.R. 1318, which includes language from the Senate version, now heads to the president’s desk to be signed into law.
“Maternal mortality rates have been rising dramatically across the country, and we need to do more to reverse that,” Sen. Capito said following the Senate’s Dec. 13 passage of H.R. 1318.
“This legislation will help us figure out what is causing this startling trend and how we can better prevent the same situations from happening in the future,” said the senator, who commended her Senate colleagues for recognizing the importance of the problem. “This brings us another step closer to strengthening our efforts to protect these mothers, and I look forward to the president signing it into law.”
Among numerous provisions, H.R. 1318 will direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a grant program for states to review pregnancy-related and pregnancy-associated maternal deaths; establish a maternal mortality review committee to review related data and information; and ensure that state departments of health develop plans to provide ongoing health care provider education toward improving the quality of maternal care, publishing findings, and suggesting recommendations, according to the congressional record summary of the bill.
Sen. Capito said in a statement last week that her bipartisan bill included in H.R. 1318 will bolster on-the-ground resources “to combat this growing crisis.”
West Virginia has had a Maternal Mortality Review Panel since 2008, she added, noting that such panels and committees currently don’t exist in more than 20 other states.