Take the files. There is no form.
Everything behind the intelligence layer, as CSV. Free to reuse with attribution, including commercially. No registration, no email, no rate limit, and no approval rights over what you write with it.
- Counties
- 3,144counties.csv · 183 KB
- Hospitals
- 4,658hospitals.csv · 875 KB
- States
- 51states.csv · 4 KB
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0attribution, that is all
| File | Rows | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
counties.csv | 3,144 | Births 2021–2024, population, lawyer establishments, births per office, delivering hospitals, hospitals with status not reported |
states.csv | 51 | The same rolled up, plus counties with no lawyer office and counties with births but no confirmed delivering hospital |
hospitals.csv | 4,658 | Obstetric service status per facility, ownership, type, Birthing Friendly designation, and the three withheld outcome measures |
outcome-audit.csv | 13 | Published versus withheld for every CMS obstetric measure, with the footnote code and its verbatim definition |
README.txt | — | Conventions, the finding below, known limits, and the citation |
One convention, and it matters
WITHHELD is a string, not a blank
A value the collecting agency did not publish is written as the literal string
WITHHELD. It is never an empty cell and never a zero.
If you sum() a column containing it, your tool will error. That is
deliberate. Those values are absent, not low, and quietly averaging past them produces a
number that looks real and is not. An error is the correct outcome; a plausible average is the
dangerous one.
Before you use the outcome columns in hospitals.csv
All three are WITHHELD for every row, because for the 2024 reporting
period CMS published no hospital-level obstetric outcome scores at all — zero of 4,426. The columns
are present so the absence is explicit rather than something you infer from a missing header.
The full audit, and
the write-up.
| Do not use it to | Because |
|---|---|
| Infer where claims are more likely | Nothing here measures litigation. Lawyer establishment density measures where lawyers have offices. |
| Judge a hospital | Obstetric outcome scores are withheld in their entirety. Birthing Friendly is a structural attestation, not a result. |
| Rank counties by "legal need" | NAICS 541110 does not distinguish practice areas, and counts locations rather than firms or attorneys. |
| Read a county with no delivering hospital as having no obstetric care | Births are counted by mother’s residence; delivery happens wherever the hospital is, frequently in the next county. |
| Correlate clinical outcomes with legal activity | Different quantities, different collectors, different purposes. We never join them and neither should you. |
Want a different cut?
By year, by geography, by facility type, joined to something of your own — ask and we will produce it, free, usually within the week. We will also tell you where the data will not support the question, which is generally the more useful half of the reply. Ask for a cut →
A limit we will not cross. Nothing on this page links a clinical outcome rate to a legal claim. Adverse-event rates measure medicine. Litigation measures a legal process. They are different quantities, they are collected by different agencies for different reasons, and correlating them would be the fastest way to publish something false. Where we present clinical data and legal data together, it is to describe a market — never to imply that one causes, predicts, or justifies the other.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau — County Population Totals and Components of Change, Vintage 2024 — births by county, 2021–2024
- U.S. Census Bureau — County Business Patterns, 2023 — NAICS 541110, Offices of Lawyers; establishment counts by county
- CMS Care Compare — Maternal Health · Hospital — PC-02, PC-07a, PC-07b, SM-7; 2024 reporting period
- CMS Care Compare — Hospital General Information — ownership, facility type, Birthing Friendly designation
- CMS Care Compare — Footnote Crosswalk — definitions for suppression codes
- U.S. Census Bureau — Cartographic Boundary Files, 2023 (1:20,000,000) — county and state polygons; projected to Albers equal-area at build time
Cite this analysis
Free to reproduce with attribution, including commercially. Charts may be embedded as published.
Birth Injury Marketing. “Births, obstetric delivery capacity and legal services capacity by U.S. county.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/data/
Journalists and researchers: the underlying data is already published as CSV at /data/, free and without conditions — no form. Need a different cut, by state, county, hospital or year? Ask, and we will also tell you what the data cannot support.
The layer these come from → · Every join, and the three datasets we could not get → · Found an error? →
Authorship & review
- Author
- Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
- Last reviewed
- Corrections
- Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.