Olivia Walton is committing $100 million over the next five years to try to cut the U.S. maternal mortality rate in half.
Walton, CEO of Ingeborg Investments and a member of the Walmart founding family, founded Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America in April to tackle what she called a maternal health crisis. She said the mission is personal because she faced serious gaps in care herself after giving birth.
'It’s personal,' Walton told Claire Zillman onstage at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Monday. 'I went through it myself, and I saw that even with all my resources, with my family, with my education, it was still really hard.'
When Walton had her middle child in 2020, she said she did not get the 'postpartum care she needed' in Arkansas. She also said the state has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, around double the national average.
'Women are dying in Arkansas from complications from giving birth at the same rate they are in Cuba,' Walton said. 'And don’t forget—never forget—that for Black and brown women, the mortality rate is three times higher.'
Through the nonprofit, Walton and her husband, Tom Walton, are backing what she described as a bipartisan campaign. The effort includes storytelling, advocacy, coalition-building and catalytic grant-making. Arkansas and Kansas will each receive $10 million from the foundation to improve maternal health.
Walton said the issue could worsen next year because of Medicaid cuts and changes in the way the American Medical Association bills patients. She said she hopes people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on one thing: 'Everybody wants healthy families.'
She also said the $100 million pledge is not enough on its own and called for more midwives and doulas. Beyond expanding the workforce, Walton urged employers to improve pregnancy and postpartum benefits. She said large self-insured companies that improve their perinatal benefits see costs come down and outcomes improve.
'Expand your benefits,' Walton said. 'Take better care of moms, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s usually the smart thing to do for your business.'
The market has already voted on a simple truth Walton is putting into practice: better outcomes usually follow better incentives. When private capital steps in where public systems fail, the result is not ideology. It is execution.
There is also a broader lesson for employers and policymakers. If maternal care can be improved with more choice, more workforce support and better benefit design, then Washington’s answer is not more slogans. It is fewer barriers, clearer incentives and real accountability for the taxpayer dollar.
