pregnancy

With no regulation, the risk of false positives and other faulty results from prenatal screenings has been known for years.

Every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. result in a stillbirth, but not all of these tragedies were inevitable.

The Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee will be tasked with providing recommendations to improving health outcomes and reducing deaths and complications from childbirth. Maternal deaths in the U.S. are five times as high as Sweden, and African-American women are almost four times as likely to die as white American women.

The House Health Committee is considering legislation that would allow pharmacists to dispense additional types of contraception without a doctor’s note, as well as a bill that will require the Oregon Health Plan to set up billing codes to allow hospitals to be paid for inserting IUDs after mothers have given birth.

Conception is not considered a life-changing event under the Affordable Care Act’s strict rules for women to get insurance outside of the open enrollment period, leaving a small number of women pregnant and uninsured. Oregon also has stingier coverage levels than other states when it comes to allowing pregnant women to get Medicaid. Advocates are asking the Insurance Division to require insurers to sell to women year round if they get pregnant, just as women qualify when they give birth.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Insurers and some employers have long tried to sidestep paying for maternity care, which includes prenatal, delivery and postpartum services.

Nutrition, decreased environmental hazards key to preventing miscarriages, cancer, think tank says.

Women who are eligible for state medical assistance because they are pregnant are not covered by the coordinated care organizations, leaving them with benefits but no speciality providers to take them. This leaves them unable to get access to dentists who can fix painful root canals or other procedures more complicated than what a primary care dentist can offer.

Abortion rates are at their lowest since 1973, when the Roe v. Wade court decision made the procedure legal, according to figures released by the Guttmacher Institute earlier this year. Michelle Stranger-Hunter, executive director of NARAL and the Oregon Reproductive Health Foundation, noted that the study in question covers the years between 2008 and 2011. Between 2011 and 2013, more than 205 abortion restrictions passed in different states nationwide – more than in the previous decade, Stranger-Hunter said. (None of them passed in Oregon, which is the only state not to have passed any restrictions on abortion since Roe.)

A bill passed the House that eliminates copays for the additional costs that diabetic women face when pregnant, while the budget committee is struggling to determine how much tax money is needed to screen uninsured women for breast and cervical cancer. Both bills were initiatives of the Oregon Women’s Health and Wellness Alliance.