Harmonized U.S. Fetal Death Microdata, 1992-2022

A harmonized dataset of 1,634,195 U.S. fetal death records covering 1992-2022 (29 data years; 2003 and 2004 deferred for distinct transition layouts), derived from NCHS public-use fetal death microdata files. The pipeline resolves four record layouts and the 1989-revision / 2003-revision certificate change into a single 73-column harmonized schema,  with 16 derived analytic indicators in a sibling 89-column file. Six cross-era code-normalization recodes (B1-B6) align V2-era (1992-2002) coding to the V1-era (2005-2022) scheme on fetal_sex, delivery_method_recode, maternal_race_bridged, paternal_age_recode11, and delivery_place_recode; three within-era columns are explicitly tagged with incompatibility warnings. Validated against 74 published NCHS / NVSR reference counts (74/74 exact). Companion to the U.S. Natality Harmonization Project (Zenodo concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19363074), which supplies the live-birth denominators needed for fetal mortality rate computation.Source data: NCHS public-use fetal death files (1992-2022). Code: MIT License. Data outputs: CC-BY 4.0.