“You never know when you need to look like you have a little bit of sense and a little bit of money.”

Those were the words of Charles Johnson IV as he accompanied his wife to the hospital as she prepared to give birth to their second son. He would leave the hospital without her – another mortality statistic in the staggeringly high number of maternal deaths in this country.

According to William Callaghan of the CDC, the definition of a pregnancy-related death is when a woman dies while pregnant or within one year of the end of her pregnancy. According to National Geographic magazine, all women...