This handy voting guide will help you pick the best candidate this November Chamber of Mothers and Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America built a free tool that puts your state's maternal health data next to the candidates on your 2026 ballot. There are 85 million mothers in the United States, and how a country treats them is one of the truest measures of its health. By that standard, America is failing.
It’s more dangerous to have a baby here than in any other wealthy nation, and most moms couldn’t tell you how their own state stacks up. A new nonpartisan voter guide is built to change that. Chamber of Mothers and Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America (HMHBA) just launched Vote Like a Mother, a free tool that maps maternal health outcomes across all 50 states and Washington, DC.
It can also show you the candidates on your 2026 ballot, and how they stack up on creating better outcomes. Click into any state and you’ll see its maternal mortality rate measured against the developed-world average, as well as the voting records and platforms of its 2026 gubernatorial candidates. It takes a statistic that’s otherwise abstract and makes it clear and actionable for you, specifically: your state’s rate, your candidates, your ballot.
Roughly a third of pregnancy-related deaths happen in the year after birth, well past the six-week checkup, once postpartum appointments taper off. That’s the same window where overall care thins out. About 40% of new moms never make it to a postpartum visit at all, according to research the campaign cites.
The cost of that gap isn’t only measured by deaths. Our health care system is failing moms in other ways, too: postpartum depression and anxiety that go unscreened, a pelvic floor that never gets rehabbed, lactation problems no one helps solve, and blood pressure spikes that don’t get tracked, just to name a few. Most of it is manageable when someone is paying attention, and quietly dangerous when no one is.
The CDC estimates that 87% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. The numbers are even more startling for Black women, who are more than 3 times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause as white women, according to CDC data. American Indian and Alaska Native women are roughly twice as likely, with rural mothers facing the steepest odds as labor and delivery units keep closing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
