A New Tool for Estimating the Number of Pregnant People in the United States

Penelope Strid; Regina M Simeone; Rebecca Hall; Jessica R Meeker; Sascha R Ellington

doi:10.1097/AOG.0000000000005750

A New Tool for Estimating the Number of Pregnant People in the United States

Obstet Gynecol. 2024 Oct 3. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000005750. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Penelope Strid¹, Regina M Simeone, Rebecca Hall, Jessica R Meeker, Sascha R Ellington

Affiliation

¹ Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division and the Influenza Division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and the Division of Reproductive Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, Rockville, Maryland.

PMID: 39361960
DOI: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000005750

Abstract

Background: Knowing the approximate number of women of reproductive age (ie, 15-49 years) who are pregnant at a point in time in the United States can aid in emergency preparedness resource allocation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a pregnancy estimator toolkit in 2012, which could be used to estimate the number of pregnant people in a geographic area at a point in time. This original toolkit did not account for pregnancy losses before 20 weeks of gestation; however, an updated toolkit released by the CDC in May 2024 uses a ratio of live births to estimate the number of pregnancy losses before 20 weeks at a point in time for improved estimation of total pregnant people at a point in time.

Instrument: We used the CDC's updated reproductive health tool, "Estimating the Number of Pregnant Women in a Geographic Area."

Experience: Using publicly available data for 2020, we gathered the necessary input values, including total births, fetal deaths, and induced abortions, and applied the equation available in the CDC toolkit to estimate the number of pregnant people in the United States at any point in time in 2020.

Conclusion: In 2020, there were 75,582,028 women of reproductive age in the United States, and we estimate that approximately 2,962,052 or 3.9% of women of reproductive age were pregnant at any point in time in the United States.