Moral Panic
02 May 2026I think I just discovered a new moral panic! I saw the factoid go by that “the number one cause of death among pregnant women in the US is intimate partner violence.” (paraphrasing this bluesky post) That sounds bad! And there’s plenty of sources that seemingly back it up. The Harvard School of Public Health has a headline “Homicide leading cause of death for pregnant women in U.S.””. CNN says “With homicide a leading cause of maternal death…”. US News “Homicide a Leading Cause of Death for Pregnant U.S. Women”.
It’s interesting that Harvard says “Homicide leading cause of death”, while the other headlines have “homicide a leading cause of death” (emph added on that a). I think that changes the meaning of the sentence. Without the “a”, I think the missing article most US English speakers would assume is “the”.
It looks like these news articles all trace back to an opinion (i.e., not peer reviewed) piece in the British Medical Journal, which in turn cites an Obst Gynecol articleHomicide During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period in the United States, 2018-2019. Now that article has the sentence “Homicide during pregnancy or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy exceeded all the leading causes of maternal mortality by more than twofold”. But if we look at their plot, They can only say that because they split all the different medical causes of death into different categories! They don’t have a table with the numbers that go into the plot, but if one is petty enough to load it into an image viewer and count the damn pixels, one finds that the medical complications actually outnumber homicides.
The paper also states they find “3.62 homicides per 100,000 live births among females who were pregnant or within 1 year postpartum”. Again, that’s bad. There should be zero homicides per 100,000 births. Homicides are very bad. But, just to put that number in perspective, the US is currently has around 12 motor vehicle deaths per 100k people. And the homicide rate for men is 5.4 per 100k.
This is tough, we’ve got Harvard on one side saying gun violence is “a health emergency for pregnant women.”. But when we look at the data around how people in the US die, it looks like homicide accounts for around 10% of pregnant women deaths, I would call it probably the 4th leading cause of death behind drug overdoses, auto accidents, and medical complications. This NEMJ article Overdose, Homicide, and Suicide as Causes of Maternal Death in the United States seems to track that.
How does one go against fighting a clickbait social panic? I’m going to call this the Nuclear Winter Problem. In the early 1980s, everyone’s favorite astronomer Carl Sagan spoke out against nuclear weapons. Sagen published research about how the resulting fire storms in cities hit with nuclear weapons would pollute the atmosphere and cool the planet, causing a “nuclear winter”. Scientists in the field found his work to be lacking, he seemed to me massively over-predicting the cooling effect. But no one wants to be seen as speaking out in favor of nuclear weapons.