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After you give birth, you're likely focused on the care that your baby needs. But health problems can happen to you in the weeks and months after childbirth. They are called postpartum complications.

Some of these problems can be life-threatening. A pregnancy-related death is the death of a person while pregnant or within one year of the end of a pregnancy. More than half of pregnancy-related deaths happen after a baby is born.

In recent decades in the U.S., there has been a large rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Black, American Indian and Alaska Native people are 2 to 3 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than are white people. More than 60% of pregnancy-related deaths are thought to be preventable.