Soaring maternal mortality rates in New Jersey and across the nation have been artificially inflated by unreliable data collection methods used by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a new study00005-X/fulltext) from researchers at Rutgers University and other universities. Maternal mortality rates in America nearly doubled in the United States from 17.4 per 100,000 live births in 2018 to 32.9 in 2021, compared with a rate of 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019, according to the National Vital Statistics System. But the researchers questioned how that could be true. Not …