US MILLENNIAL WOMEN ARE MORE LIKELY TO DIE AT AN EARLY AGE

For decades, young women in the US saw sharp progress in their health and safety with each passing generation, but that momentum has now reversed for millennials.

That’s according to a report published by the Washington DC-based non-profit Population Reference Bureau, which studied the well-being of women aged 25 to 34 from each generation of Americans.

It found that women born between 1981 and 1999 —widely classified as millennials—  have seen the first drop in well-being since the Silent Generation as they live through young adulthood.

“Women today are more likely to die during their late 20s and early 30s than at any other point in the previous three generations,” said the report.

The death rate has risen in parallel with a startling increase in maternal mortality rates among women aged 25 to 34, with 30.4 deaths due to pregnancy complications out of 100,000 births for millennials, the report said.

That’s compared to 21 deaths per 100,000 births for the Silent Generation —or women who were born during and before World War II— and 7.5 for baby boomers and 9.2 for Generation X when they were aged 25 to 34.

The report acknowledged that part of the surge might be due to better data collection in recent years. But it also noted that after all US states implemented a new data system in 2019, pregnancy deaths continued to rise sharply.

Millennial women are also the first in the last century to experience rising suicide rates, with 7 suicides among 100,000 women aged 25 to 34, the report said.

Baby boomer and Gen X women, meanwhile, saw a respective 6 and 4.4 suicides per 100,000 women when they were aged 25 to 34.

And homicide rates for millennial women rose to 4.5 deaths per 100,000 women aged 25 to 34, compared to 4.3 deaths for Gen X women when they were the same age, according to PRB.

Violent deaths among young women actually fell to 3.3 per 100,000 people in 2017, when PRB issued its last index. But statistics now show the rate swelled so quickly in the last six years that it surpassed that of Gen X, per the report.

Matthew Loh //Business Insider