This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello, this is Morales on the BBC World Service and I'm Ruth Alexander.

The team at Morales love going to the cinema and watching a new film

and the one that's got everyone in the office excited recently is the film based on the book by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.

Beautiful wife, handsome husband.

Life goes missing on her anniversary.

You talk like a man who believes his wife is still alive.

Being the professionals that we are, even on our downtime, we on the Morales team still keep our eyes open for statistical claims that we haven't heard before

and there was one in Gone Girl that did catch our attention.

Now for those of you who haven't seen it, don't worry.

We don't think it'll spoil the plot to tell you that during the film there's the claim that the third most common cause of death for pregnant women is homicide.

But can that really be true?

I've been speaking to Dr. Katherine Gold, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the United States,

who's done research on homicide in pregnant women.

She told me the first thing to figure out when looking at the data is how pregnancy associated deaths are defined.

And it isn't as clear cut as you might think.

The World Health Organization defines maternal mortality as women who died during pregnancy or within the first 42 days,

which is about six weeks after they deliver.

In the United States, we look at both pregnancy and the first full year after a woman delivers as a pregnancy associated death.

Because it's thought that a lot of the things that may cause women to die long after they've delivered are actually associated to the pregnancy.

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