42 U.S.C. § 247b–12 — Safe motherhood

(a) Surveillance (1) Purpose This subsection aims to start or continue a federal program supporting state and tribal maternal mortality review committees, improve how maternal mortality data is collected and reported, and build surveillance systems to better understand maternal complications and death, especially disparities between different groups of people. (2) Activities To do this, the Secretary, through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may: (A) continue and improve a national program to collect and track data on maternal deaths — identifying deaths that happen during, or within a year after, a pregnancy, and improving how that data is broken down consistent with privacy law; (B) expand the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System to cover every state; (C) expand the Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Program, giving states technical support, money, or the temporary loan of senior epidemiologists; and (D) work with states, tribes, and tribal organizations to help them set up or run maternal mortality review committees, following the rules in (d). (b) Prevention research (1) Purpose This subsection lets the Secretary expand research on risk factors, prevention strategies, and the roles families, health care providers, and communities play in safe motherhood. (2) Research The Secretary may fund research on: (A) counseling before pregnancy, especially for at-risk women such as those with diabetes or a substance use disorder; (B) the most important parts of prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care; (C) outreach and support services, like folic acid education, available to pregnant women; (D) identifying women at high risk of complications; (E) preventing preterm delivery; (F) preventing urinary tract infections; (G) preventing unnecessary C-sections; (H) what causes disparities in maternal care, health risks, and outcomes, including why Black women and other groups have disproportionately high maternal death rates; (I) reducing disparities in maternity services and outcomes; (J) the link between interpersonal violence and maternal complications and death; (K) preventing harm from smoking and substance misuse before, during, and after pregnancy; (L) preventing infections that cause maternal and infant complications; (M) the link between rural maternal and obstetric care and delivery and postpartum outcomes; and (N) other areas the Secretary decides are appropriate. (c) Prevention programs The Secretary may run activities that promote safe motherhood, including (1) public education on healthy pregnancy, (2) education for doctors, nurses, and other providers, (3) activities that build community support for pregnant women, and (4) activities that promote physical, mental, and behavioral health during pregnancy and up to a year afterward, focused on preventing and treating mental health and substance use disorders. (d) Maternal mortality review committees (1) To take part in the program under (a)(2)(D), a state's, tribe's, or tribal organization's review committee must (A) include diverse members from a range of clinical specialties, including obstetricians and gynecologists, along with public health officials, epidemiologists, statisticians, community organizations, people from different areas the committee covers, and people who represent the populations most affected by these deaths and by poor access to maternal care; and (B) show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that its methods for collecting and reviewing data reliably find every pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related death, no matter how the pregnancy ended. (2) Process for confidential reporting Participating states, tribes, and tribal organizations must build, through their review committee, a process that (A) lets health professionals, health facilities, medical examiners, coroners, and other appropriate people confidentially report these deaths to the state or tribal health agency; (B) lets family members and other appropriate people confidentially and voluntarily report these deaths to the health agency, for the committee to review; and (C) makes the committee's contact information public and reaches out to local professional, community, and social service groups about the committee. (3) Data collection and review Participants must (A) each year identify these deaths — (i) through vital statistics, by matching each relevant death record to a birth certificate or fetal death record where possible, identifying causes where practical, and using medical examiner and coroner reports to improve the quality of death records; and (ii) using other methods to catch deaths the vital-statistics matching misses; (B) have the committee review the data to spot outcomes, trends, patterns, and disparities that contribute to these deaths, and use that review to recommend ways to improve maternal care to the people and groups who report data under (2)(A); (C) identify training available to those reporters so they can accurately identify and report these deaths; (D) make sure the data, where practical, is in a format the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can analyze; and (E) publicly explain the methods used to identify these deaths. (4) Confidentiality Participants must protect confidentiality by making sure (A) the review committee, including its individual members, never tells anyone — including any government official — identifying information about a specific case, and (B) nothing from the committee's proceedings, including its deliberations or records, is made public unless state or federal law specifically allows it. (5) Reports to CDC Starting in fiscal year 2019 and every year after, each participating committee must send the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a report with (A) its data, findings, and recommendations, and (B) an update on carrying out any recommendations it made in earlier years. (6) State partnerships States may team up with neighboring states to carry out these activities. If they do, filing one combined report satisfies each partner state's reporting duty. (7) Appropriate mechanisms for Indian tribes and tribal organizations The Secretary, working with Indian tribes, must set up ways for tribes and tribal organizations to show they qualify, report their data, and carry out these activities — which can include technical help with grant applications and managing the award. (8) Research availability The Secretary must make sure the data collected under (5) is available for research, where practical and appropriate, while protecting identifiable information consistent with state and federal privacy law. (e) Best practices relating to the prevention of maternal mortality (1) In general The Secretary, through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and in consultation with the Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, must find and share best practices for preventing maternal illness and death with health care providers, professional societies, and perinatal quality collaboratives, taking into account findings from other federal maternal health programs. (2) Frequency The Secretary must share these best practices at least once every fiscal year. (f) Definitions In this section: (1) "Indian tribe" and "tribal organization" mean what section 5304 of title 25 says; (2) "pregnancy-associated death" means the death of a woman, from any cause, during or within a year after her pregnancy, no matter how or when the pregnancy ended; and (3) "pregnancy-related death" means a death during or within a year after pregnancy that (A) is caused or made worse by the pregnancy or its treatment, and (B) is not from an accidental or unrelated cause. (g) Authorization of appropriations $100,000,000 is authorized for each of fiscal years 2026 through 2030.