How Your MomScore?
Revolution Health has an interesting service available that shares just how mom friendly each state in the US really is. It’s called MomScore, and you can use it to see how your state ranks on several issues important to the health and wellbeing of moms and children.
Each state is judged on several criteria to determine their overall score. Access to prenatal care, maternal mortality, risk of pregnancy complications, childcare availability, infant mortality, air quality, violent crime rate, access to health insurance, affordable children’s health insurance, and the state’s mandatory paid leave policies are all picked over and compared to give a breakdown of how the individual states add up. If you are curious as to how they determined the scores you can read their methodology here.
Mississippi comes in last in their score card while Vermont is number one. My own state, Oklahoma, came in near the bottom of the heap at #44 out of 51 states and D.C. Access to prenatal care and health care coverage are ranked as Oklahoma’s worst issues. I do wonder exactly who they are including in their results of access to prenatal care. Did they count midwives in their numbers? Not that it would add much to OKlahoma, says the mom who had to drive over an hour in labor to get to the nearest midwife, but I wonder if that would increase the scores of other states.
Check out the numbers and see how your state ranks. What other qualifications would you add to the list?
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