ImageA mural met the moment recently in Manhattan. The stimulus package is putting a spotlight on America’s alarmingly high maternal mortality rate.Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s easy to overlook amid the hundreds of pages of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan President Biden signed into law Thursday, but a short section aims to combat America’s maternal mortality crisis by expanding health coverage for new mothers.The United States has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the industrialized world. A third of those deaths happen after delivery, when a significant share of American women experience a gap in coverage.Under current law, all states provide Medicaid coverage to low-income women who are pregnant. More than 40 percent of babies born each year in the United States are to mothers enrolled in the public health program.But coverage runs out 60 days after delivery, causing many women to become uninsured shortly after giving birth.The American Rescue Plan will let states extend Medicaid coverage for a full year, and provides federal funding to do so. As with the enhanced child tax credit, expanding postpartum Medicaid is another stimulus policy that bolsters the safety net supporting low-income parents in the United States “Illinois has one of the highest maternal death rates for Black mothers, which is very concerning to me,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, who has written legislation calling for this policy change. “These are also communities that have been especially hard hit by the pandemic.” Legislators have become increasingly concerned about the nation’s maternal mortality rate, which declined through most of the 20th century but has increased in the last few decades. Black mothers have a significantly higher mortality rate than white mothers, and women giving birth in the United States over all are twice as likely to die as those in Canada, and five times as likely as those in Germany.A recent study found that 20 percent of uninsured new mothers skipped care because of cost, and half worried about not being able to afford their medical bills.“These aren’t people who are uninsured because they don’t think it’s valuable, or don’t have health concerns,” said Stacey McMorrow, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute and author of the study. “They are people who have medical needs.”Her research found that, between 2015 and 2018, 11.5 percent of new mothers lacked health insurance coverage. That rate is slightly higher than the general population’s. About half of those uninsured women were Hispanic, and two-thirds lived in the South. The uninsured rate for new mothers is especially high in states that do not participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which provides public coverage to all citizens who earn less than 133 percent of the federal poverty line.Recent studies have found that increased Medicaid access for the general population, which will cover