Courtesy of Maeve Wallace
Maeve Wallace, PhD, studies maternal mortality. Specifically, she studies the violent deaths of pregnant and postpartum women. She’s known for years that guns are involved in most cases of maternal mortality. But Wallace has never been able to recommend gun-restricting policies in her federally funded research papers or request federal funding for gun violence research until now.
After a 24-year-long ban, the federal government made funds available to study gun-violence and gun-violence prevention through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“I think it’s sort of shocking to believe that it was banned for so long,” Wallace said. “If we were to really think about the magnitude of loss of life among pregnant and postpartum women in this country, we want to include homicide and suicide to really capture the magnitude of this problem.”