Maternity care is fully available across much of Northeast Ohio, including Cuyahoga County, according to data by the Center for Community Solutions. Despite that, pregnant people in the county are more likely to have poor health outcomes than people in much of the rest of the state.
That indicates there is a disconnect between getting mothers the proper care that the data shows is available in the county, said Emily Muttillo, the center's director of research.
“We’re in a maternal health care crisis, and we need to really think about it wholistically,” Muttillo said. “It’s a combination of things.”
Cuyahoga County is amongst the best in the state for the availability of maternity care, according to a study by the Center for Community Solutions, which was re-released this month with an interactive map.
But between 2008 and 2016, the pregnancy-related maternal mortality rate was about 20% greater in Cuyahoga County than statewide, according to Ohio Department of Health data. There were 17.6 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births in the county, compared to 14.7 statewide.
The state health department data showed that the majority of women who died during their pregnancies or within one year of giving birth were Black.
“We actually have full access in here in Cuyahoga County and the surrounding counties, so we in theory are in much better shape. However, when you look at the maternal mortality data, we see that Black women have the highest rate of maternal mortality in Ohio,” Muttillo said.
There are other barriers for Northeast Ohio’s women of color that may keep them from receiving available maternal health care, she said. For example, the cost of the care, a lack of representation in the available physicians or clinicians or even lacking the time to see a doctor could be factors.
“That is one thing we are definitely paying attention to —what it is about being a Black woman that makes you more likely to have a maternal health care issue to die from giving birth,” Muttillo said. "And it doesn’t appear to be access as we might have thought it was.”
The center's data grades each county as either full, moderate, low or desert in terms of maternity care access. Most Northeast Ohio counites are considered to have full care access. Ashtabula, Coshocton, Holmes and Tuscarawas Counties are low. Carroll and Morrow Counites are graded as deserts.
Muttillo said 13 counties in Ohio don’t have maternal healthcare at all, meaning there aren’t any hospitals or clinicians providing maternal health care.
In 2024, the center released a study outlining factors contributing to an individual's likelihood of receiving inadequate prenatal care. That too was multifaceted. A person's race, education level and whether they had health insurance and what kind it was played a role, researchers found.
Nearly 16% of Ohio births — more than 94,000 births between 2018 and 2022 — were deemed to have inadequate prenatal care. That puts Ohio's rate slightly above the national rate of 14.5%, the study showed.
The data showed that Black, Hispanic and Native Ohioans were about 10 percentage points less likely to receive adequate prenatal care than their white and Asian or Pacific Islander counterparts.
