A new study shows drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in Utah — and overdoses appear to kill women as indiscriminately as blood clots and car wrecks do, heedless of their income, race or where they live.
“People assume that ’They can tell who has a problem,'” said physician Marcela Smid, an assistant professor of maternal and fetal medicine at University of Utah Health. “You can’t — addiction affects every segment of society.”
Smid and other researchers focused on state health records that document the deaths of women who are pregnant or were pregnant less than a year before they died — in all, 136 deaths from 2005 to 2014.