That happens somewhere in the United States on average twice a day.

My day with Dr. Hollier underscored that there’s one very simple and inexpensive starting point: Help women and girls avoid pregnancies they don’t want. “You can’t die from a pregnancy when you’re not pregnant,” Dr. Hollier noted.

Almost half of pregnancies in America are unintended. And almost one-third of American girls will become pregnant as teenagers. (Meanwhile, President Trump slashed $213 million in funding for teenage pregnancy prevention programs.)

One patient, Monica Leija, told Dr. Hollier that she had been on the pill but switched jobs, and her new position didn’t offer insurance for the first three months. That meant she would have had to pay the $40-a-month cost herself, and she figured the odds were against her becoming pregnant during that window.

“I just didn’t think it would happen,” she said. Now she’s bulging with a pregnancy at almost full term.

I heard a lot of comments like that. Derrion Harris, 21, has a year-old child who was not planned, and now Harris is sexually active again. Dr. Hollier asked if she uses birth control.

“I use condoms,” she said, then corrected herself: “I use condoms sometimes.”

Some of you readers are thinking this is outrageous irresponsibility. But we should also look at society’s irresponsibility in failing to help all women and girls get access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, or LARCs.

The U.S. failure on maternal mortality is particularly striking because around the world, maternal mortality has plunged by almost half since 1990; the U.S. is a rare country in which maternal deaths have become more common in recent years.