Philanthropists Olivia and Tom Walton have committed an initial $100 million over five years to Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America (HMHBA), a bipartisan national campaign with a single stated target: cut the U.S. maternal mortality rate in half by 2031.
Executive director Robin Reck called it “perhaps the single largest private investment ever made” aimed at U.S. maternal mortality, and was blunt about the ambition: “We are not aiming for incremental progress. We are aiming to cut the maternal mortality rate in half in five years.”
Why does the U.S. have a maternal mortality problem at all?
The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and unlike most peer countries its rate has been moving in the wrong direction. The CDC recorded 688 deaths in 2024 during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth — a rate of 19 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from 18.6 the year before.
The number that drives the campaign’s theory of change is a different one: the CDC finds that roughly 87% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. This is not primarily a problem of missing science. It is a problem of care that exists but does not reach people.
Two structural facts explain much of the gap. First, 65–67% of pregnancy-related deaths occur in the postpartum year — after the delivery that the entire U.S. maternity system is organized around, and often after insurance coverage, clinical attention and social support have all tapered off. Second, about 40% of mothers receive no postpartum follow-up care at all. The system is built for the birth, not for the year that follows it.
Outcomes are also sharply unequal. Per CDC data, Black women die of pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, and rural communities face compounding access problems as obstetric units close.
What the $100 million actually buys
The campaign is explicit that $100 million cannot fix a problem it estimates costs the economy $165 billion each year. The money is designed as catalytic capital — structured to attract matching commitments from states and from other public and private funders rather than to fund services directly at scale.
The stated funding areas are state matching grants, high-impact partnerships, and the infrastructure needed to move proven interventions into practice. In concrete terms that means telehealth expansion in rural areas, midwife workforce training, postpartum care expansion, and research and data investment — with state participation tied to measurable interventions.
The emphasis on scaling existing interventions rather than inventing new ones follows directly from the 87% figure. Maternal mortality review committees, postpartum home visiting, standardized hemorrhage and hypertension protocols, and extended postpartum Medicaid coverage are all established tools with uneven adoption. The bottleneck is deployment, not discovery.
The bipartisan framing, and why it is load-bearing
HMHBA launched in May 2026 with Dr. Neel Shah as president, Robin Reck as executive director, and Olivia Walton as founder. It has drawn support across party lines — Senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with Senators Hassan, Collins and Smith and Representatives Underwood and Fitzpatrick.
That is not incidental positioning. Because the strategy depends on state matching funds, it has to work in legislatures of both parties, in a period when most other health-policy questions have become sharply partisan. The campaign cites polling to argue the ground is favorable: 86% of voters support improving maternal health, 79% say they would vote for candidates championing reforms, and all 15 tested policy proposals drew majority support among Republicans, Democrats and independents. Telehealth and postpartum home visiting polled strongest.
The cost angle
One statistic reframes the whole discussion: the average U.S. birth costs $20,416, the highest in the world, for outcomes that trail every other wealthy country. American maternity care is not underfunded in aggregate — it is expensive and badly distributed, concentrated on the hospital delivery and thin everywhere else along the timeline.
What to watch
“Nearly 90 percent of maternal deaths are preventable,” Olivia Walton said. “America should be the safest place in the world to have a baby.” Dr. Shah put the equity case simply: “A mother’s safety shouldn’t depend on her zip code, her race, or where she gives birth.”
The honest caveats are about execution rather than intent. Halving a rate that is currently rising within five years would be a dramatic reversal. Philanthropy at this scale can seed and demonstrate, but it cannot substitute for Medicaid policy, hospital staffing decisions, or the economics keeping rural obstetric units open — and the matching-grant model means results depend on states choosing to participate. The first real signal will be how many do. Health policy news, not medical advice.