Just hours after Rhonda Swaney left a prenatal appointment for her first pregnancy, she felt severe pain in her stomach and started vomiting.
Then 25 years old and six months pregnant, she drove herself to the emergency room in Ronan, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where an ambulance transferred her to a larger hospital 60 miles away in Missoula. Once she arrived, the staff couldn’t detect her baby’s heartbeat. Swaney began to bleed heavily. She delivered a stillborn baby and was hospitalized for several days. At one point, doctors told her to call her family. They didn’t expect her to survive.
“It certainly changed my life — the experience — but my life has not been a bad life,” she told KFF Health News.
Though her experiences were nearly 50 years ago, Swaney, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said Native Americans continue to receive inadequate maternal care. The data appears to support that belief.
In 2024, the most recent year for which data for the population is available, Native American and Alaska Native people had the highest pregnancy-related mortality ratio among major demographic groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In response to this disparity, Native organizations, the CDC, and some states are working to boost tribal participation in state maternal mortality review committees to better track and address pregnancy-related deaths in their communities. Native organizations are also cons …