Pregnancy Gun Deaths
Gun deaths of people who were pregnant, or within one year of being pregnant.
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Pregnant women and birthing people are more likely to die by homicide than any other obstetric-related cause, as The Trace reported in 2024. At the center of the crisis is the firearm — used in a majority of these killings, frequently at the hands of intimate partners.
The Gun Violence Data Hub analyzed detailed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which contains information about every death in the United States. This raw data is not publicly released and its release to researchers and journalists carries conditions — including that we cannot publish counts that represent ten or fewer deaths, so those are omitted here.
In keeping with the work of leading researchers in the field, we limited the analysis to the years 2018 to 2023, the most recent year available. 2018 was the first year that all 50 states and D.C. implemented a pregnancy checkbox on their death records.
For two tables — pregnancy-gun-deaths-status.csv and pregnancy-gun-deaths-type.csv — the analysis was limited to females between the age of 10 and 44, in keeping with analyses like the study previously linked to.
For the other three tables — pregnancy-gun-deaths-ethnicity-race.csv, pregnancy-gun-deaths-state-type.csv and pregnancy-gun-deaths-state.csv — the analysis was limited to females between the age of 15 and 44 in order to align it with data available on live births.
We calculated the rates as deaths per 100,000 live births — a standard metric.
Limitations
- Data is limited to the years 2018 through 2023, for the reasons described above.
- Deaths data here are measured by the geography of the person’s residence, not where the death occurred.
- Death counts under 10 are omitted.
- Caution is strongly advised in using the numbers to calculate sums, averages and so on, as values for many subsets are suppressed, missing, not available or not applicable. If you are looking for a specific summary stat, the Data Hub may be able to help, provided the count is 10 or greater. Reach out via our Help Desk.
- The table pregnancy-gun-deaths-type.csv contains counts of homicides and suicide. Other types of gun deaths, such as “Undetermined”, “Unintentional” and “Legal Intervention / Operations of War,” occurred in smaller numbers and so are omitted.
- Research has found that some groups are misclassified in mortality data more than others — especially true in the case of those with American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry, and to a lesser degree for people of Hispanic/Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage.
Methodology
The Trace acquired the 2018-2022 data from the CDC in November 2024, and data for calendar year 2023 in February 2025. The data was grouped by geography, race and ethnicity, pregnancy status, and type of gun death to produce the tables here, with any rows representing fewer than 10 deaths removed per our data use agreement with CDC.
The data on live births, used to calculate rates in three of these tables, comes from queries of the CDC’s natality database.