U.S. Harmonized Vital Statistics (HVS) Microdata: Natality, Linked Birth–Infant Death, Fetal Death, and Matched Multiples

The U.S. Harmonized Vital Statistics (HVS) resource integrates four National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) public-use vital-statistics microdata products into stable Apache Parquet column schemas that span multiple Standard Certificate revisions (1989 and 2003) and NCHS layout reformats. Each product carries one harmonized schema across every year it covers, removing the per-year fixed-width layout, field-name, and code-value drift that has historically forced researchers to restrict analyses to single-revision windows. Four products (this deposit): - Natality — 1968–2024 (57 years), 201,161,456 records, 84 columns (71 harmonized + 13 derived). Validated 183/183 Births: Final Data NVSR targets byte-exact for 1990–2024. - Linked birth–infant death — 1983–2023 (38 cohort years; permanent 1992–1994 NCHS-linkage gap), 149,386,620 records, 97 columns. - Fetal death — 1982–2024 (43 years), 2,427,233 records, 89 columns. - Matched multiples — twins/triplets/quadruplets with linked infant and fetal deaths across three NCHS publication windows (1995–1997, 1995–2000, 2016–2020), 1,665,568 records, 24 columns. Files: seven primary harmonized/derived Apache Parquet files (~8.3 GB), plus SHA256SUMS.txt, README.md, LICENSE, and CITATION.cff. Per-year raw parquets are reproducible from the GitHub pipelines and public NCHS source zips. Validation: every shipped per-year figure is reconciled against the corresponding National Vital Statistics Reports (NVSR) cell under each product’s documented canonical analytic filter; per-target PASS/FAIL tables ship with the resource on GitHub. Reproducibility: open-source pipelines (MIT; see Related works) re-derive every parquet bit-for-bit from public NCHS source zips. SHA-256 checksums are in each product’s PROVENANCE.md and in SHA256SUMS.txt. Licensing: harmonized data CC BY 4.0; source code MIT. Underlying NCHS source data are U.S. Government works (17 U.S.C. § 105). No NCHS Research Data Center access is required for this public-use envelope. Geography note: NCHS suppresses sub-national geography in these public-use files; the resource supports national and demographic-stratum analyses, not state-level analyses. Supersedes: prior single-product Zenodo deposits 10.5281/zenodo.19363074 (natality + linked) and 10.5281/zenodo.20031571 (fetal death 1992–2022); those records remain immutable.