These Are the Best — and Worst — States for Women's Health

A new report analyzed how the 50 states and the District of Columbia fare when it comes to women’s healthcare access, quality of care — and outcomes

• A new report analyzed women’s healthcare for quality, access, and outcomes, and found that southern states performed far below those in the north

• The report linked restrictive abortion policies with poorer outcomes for women in those states — with Mississippi and Texas falling at the bottom of the list

• The report's authors noted that it’s a “perilous time” for women’s health in the United States

A new report has analyzed how the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, rank when it comes to women’s healthcare — specifically regarding quality of care, access, and outcomes.

The results outline a dire situation for the southern states, while women in the northeast fare considerably better.

Massachusetts “is the best-performing health system for women overall,” according to the report from The Commonwealth Fund—followed by Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

Mississippi ranked the lowest, followed by Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

The report points out that, overall, “the health of women in the United States is in a perilous place. Deaths from preventable causes are on the rise and deep inequities persist, leading to stark racial differences in maternal mortality and deaths from breast and cervical cancers.”

The report also cites a recent study from the Centers of Disease Control that found that women’s life expectancy in the United States “is at its lowest since 2006.”

The same CDC report found that infant mortality rate increased 3.1%.

Related: Sudden Unexplained Infant Death Rate Among Black Babies Increased in 2020, New Study Says

“We looked at deaths from all causes among women and girls ages 15 to 44, a common way to identify women of reproductive age, and we found a threefold difference across states, with the highest rates of death concentrated in the Southeastern states,” David Radley, a senior scientist for the Commonwealth Fund’s Tracking Health System Performance initiative, told CNN.

“We also saw big differences across states in women’s ability to access care,” Radley said. “The state of health care for women in this country is in a vulnerable place.”

He also told CNN that “states with the most restrictive abortion policies also tended to have the fewest maternity care providers.”

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“There’s concern among experts that abortion bans and restrictions may reduce the number of maternity care providers even further,” he added.

Thirteen of the fourteen states with near-total abortion bans ranked below average, and half of them were among the worst-performing states.

“Those are clear policy choices that states are making that are linked to the politics in their state and that are having an impact on women’s access to health care,” Sara Collins, senior scholar and vice president for health care coverage and access and tracking health system performance at the Commonwealth Fund, told CNN.

The report also noted that, across the board, “the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is higher than that of other high-income countries.”

By comparison, in 2022, Norway’s maternal mortality rate was zero, a previous study found.

Related: American Life Expectancy Is Now at Its Lowest in Decades as COVID, Drug Overdose Deaths Rise

In addition, the report went on to say that in the U.S., there were “22 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S. — more than double, sometimes triple, the rate for most other high-income countries in this analysis. In half of the countries, there were less than five maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.”

For Black U.S. women, that number is more than doubled, approaching 50 deaths.

This is the first study of its kind performed by the Commonweath Fund, a private organization that aims to “promote a high-performing, equitable health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including people of color, people with low income, and those who are uninsured.”

It does this by supporting “and making grants to improve health care practice and policy. “

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