What is the relation between these trends and phenomena? I'm working on the answer but for now, the question is sufficient.

Births to Asian, black and Hispanic women in the United States are on the verge of surpassing births to non-Hispanic whites and will likely pass the 50% mark this year.

Over the past two decades, the US has seen soaring rates of maternal mortality and pregnancy-related complications that particularly affect minorities and those living in poverty.

The US spends more money on mothers' health than any other nation in the world, yet women in America are more likely to die during childbirth than they are in most other developed countries, according to the OECD and WHO.

Nearly one in three women who gave birth in 2006 had only briefly (9%) or never met (19%) their primary birth attendant.

Here is another Twitter Map - of tweets using the word, 'cesarean' from 3/10/10.

The NIH Consensus Development Conference on VBAC has been big news in the Maternal Care Advocacy community. Was this the first NIH conference that alluded to the presence of bloggers? Amy Romano found that mention notable. Here is an interesting picture of the social networks between tweeters who have included #NIHVBAC in their tweets as of this morning, March 10, 2010. Made by Marc Smith, ConnectedAction.net, using NodeXL. Anyone can use this open source tool to make similar network maps.

Note the centrality of tweeters' networks in the NIHVBAC map, compared to a social network map of tweets on the key words "Maternal Mortality" done early last month. Patterns of social networks differ by topic and participants. More to come!