145;Expectant mother deaths often murder146;

Their deaths passed quietly. Tara Chambers, 29, was gunned down on a June morning inside her North Carolina home. Rebecca Johnson, 16, was s...

Their deaths passed quietly. Tara Chambers, 29, was gunned down on a June morning inside her North Carolina home. Rebecca Johnson, 16, was shot in the chest as she sat in a pickup truck in Oklahoma. Ana Diaz, 28, was killed in a parking lot in Reston.

They all were pregnant, with futures that seemed sure to unfold over many years. A year-long examination by The Washington Post of death-record data in states across the US documents the killings of 1,367 pregnant women and new mothers since 1990. This is only part of the national toll, because no reliable system is in place to track such cases.

Largely unseen by the public, it is a phenomenon that is as consequential as it is poorly understood. Even in the past two years little has been said about the larger convergence of pregnancy and homicide. Until recently, many of the cases have gone virtually unstudied, uncounted, untracked. Police agencies across the country do not regularly ask about maternal status when they investigate homicides. Health experts focus on the medical complications of pregnancy.

8216;8216;It8217;s very hard to connect the dots when you don8217;t even see the dots,8217;8217; said Elaine Alpert, a public health expert at Boston University. 8216;8216;It8217;s only just starting to be recognised that there is a trend8230; between these deaths.8217;8217;

The Post8217;s analysis shows that the killings span racial and ethnic groups. In cases whose details were known, 67 per cent of women were killed with firearms. Many women were slain at home, usually by men they knew. The cases are not commonplace compared with other homicides but are more frequent than most people know8212;and have changed the way some experts think about pregnancy.

nbsp;	Woman showed off 8216;stolen8217; baby

		nbsp;	8226; MELVERN: A woman charged with killing expectant mother Bobbie Jo Stinnett and cutting the baby from her womb was showing the child off to people at a cafe and to her pastor hours before she was arrested, residents said. Lisa M. Montgomery, 36, was charged with kidnapping resulting in murder and is expected to appear in federal court on Monday. 8212;PTI	nbsp;

Five years ago in Maryland, state health researchers Isabelle Horon and Diana Cheng set out to study maternal deaths. In their study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, they wrote that in Maryland, 8216;8216;a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause.8217;8217;

Building upon this study and others, The Post contacted states and for data on maternal deaths. Many states could provide some data, mostly from death certificates. The Post combined what it collected with cases culled from other sources. The 1,367 maternal homicides took place over 14 years.

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8216;8216;That8217;s a formidable number 8212; and that8217;s just the tip,8217;8217; said Judith McFarlane, who studies violence and pregnancy at Texas Woman8217;s University and who described the void of reliable numbers as 8216;8216;embarrassing.8217;8217; 8212;LAT-WP