Morte por causas externas durante o período gravídico-puerperal: Como classificá-las? / Death due to external causes during the pregnant-puerperal period: how to classify them?
Violence during pregnancy (psychological, physical, sexual and institutional) represents a violation of women?s human rights and increases the risk of maternal and perinatal morbimortality, including homicides and suicides. This article discusses the relation between maternal deaths and deaths due to external causes and proposes a classification type to be added to Chapter XV, ?Complications during pregnancy, delivery and puerperium?, of the International Classification of Diseases ? 10th Edition (1993), which will allow to consider some deaths due to external causes as maternal deaths associated to pregnancy, after careful investigation. In order to do so, a specific code was created to fulfill an empty category, i.e. O93, with the digit numbers from O93.0 to O93.9, having as a reference the Chapter XX of the ICD 10th Edition. The code O93 could not be typed in the Information on Mortality System (IMS), but it might allow calculating the indicators of maternal mortality withand without the external causes. We hope that with the implementation of this code it will be possible to offer a standardized alternative to classify maternal deaths due to external causes before the 11th Edition of the ICD and, concomitantly, to contribute with the international argumentation that these deaths do not occur by chance, that they can be considered indirect obstetric maternal deaths, and that their exclusion from the indicator calculations only increases the levels of underreporting.