Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America pledges $100M to cut US maternal mortality rate in half

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Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, a bipartisan campaign founded by philanthropists Olivia and Tom Walton, announced a $100 million pledge Thursday to make giving birth in the United States safer.

The five-year commitment aims to cut the maternal mortality rate in the United States in half by 2031.

“For millions of moms in America, maternal health is bad and getting worse,” Olivia Walton told The Associated Press in an interview. “There’s just so much bipartisan consensus around wanting to fix this. I really think the political will is there and part of our job is to help surface that with an information campaign.”

According to the most recent data available, the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 688 people died in 2024 during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth. The maternal mortality rate rose to 19 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, up from 18.6 the year before.

Improving data collection and accelerating hospitals’ reporting of deaths is an important pillar of the new Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America initiative, Walton said. The most recent state-level data on maternal mortality is still from 2022, with annual totals based on provisional data available through 2024.

“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” she said, adding that the Waltons' nonprofit Heartland Forward partnered with The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in May to collect more data on maternal and infant health outcomes from 220 hospitals around the country called the Perinatal Improvement Collaborative.

Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America President Dr. Neel Shah said that, unlike many medical issues, maternal mortality is “eminently solvable.”

“The biggest cause of suffering isn’t a lack of knowledge,” he said. “It’s a lack of execution on the knowledge… This is a matter of will.”

The initiative will focus on expanding access to maternal health in rural areas, training midwives and expanding postpartum care, and helping states use strategies that have proved successful, Shah said. He points out that California has managed to reduce its maternal rate by half by combining strategies with investments. He said New Jersey, which previously ranked 47th among states in maternal mortality, has improved its outcomes by focusing on the cities where the needs are greatest.

Walton said states are “in the driver’s seat” for making changes to maternal and infant healthcare, in part because about 40% of births are paid for by Medicaid.

“I’ve got blue-state solutions of what works, red-state solutions of what works, and purple-state solutions of what works,” she said. “It’s really possible.”

For that reason, Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America plans to fund these care improvements by focusing on states. Walton plans to use the $100 million commitment as a way to encourage state governments to match the nonprofit’s investment. She hopes that corporations and other funders also contribute to the cause.

“Taking on risk and going first is a great use of philanthropic capital,” she said. “The goal is to prove that this works and then have state funding take it over.”

The focus on states, however, doesn’t mean the initiative won’t seek federal solutions as well.

Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America is supporting bipartisan Congressional legislation, including the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act and the NIH IMPROVE Act, which would expand access to maternal care.

“It’s unacceptable that in 2026 in the U.S., maternal mortality rates are moving in the wrong direction, Republican Sen. Katie Britt, of Alabama, said in a statement. “It’s imperative we work together across both the public and private sectors to reverse this alarming trend.”

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, of New Jersey, said poor maternal health outcomes don’t just hurt families.

“The economic consequences are equally alarming,” Booker said in a statement, estimating a cost of $165 billion each year.

Walton said the issue is a personal one for her and her husband, Tom, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who live in Arkansas.

“I’m a mom myself and I just had three kids in the last eight years,” she said. "I live in a state with the worst maternal mortality in the country.”

However, she also believes the issue has broad, national implications.

“I have an overarching belief that if you take care of mom, she’ll take care of everything else,” Walton said. “Healthy moms lead to healthy families. Healthy families lead to healthy communities. Healthy communities lead to a healthy economy.”

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