Is there a more appropriate way to interpret this Maternal Mortality Rate data? Ratio or percentage?

My fiancee and I are discussing maternal mortality rates in the US. According to the data, from a May 2017 NPR article, 26.4 out of every 100,000 women die during child birth in the US.

My fiancee wanted to put this into percentage, which is .000264%. He is claiming that using a percentage is more appropriate for this matter and that saying 26.4 out of 100,000 is being used because it sounds like a bigger number and is more dramatic. He is claiming that looking at it as a percentage is more effective, I am claiming that it can be looked at that way, but it seems easier to interpret more appropriate to look at it the first way.


Why is it that NPR chose to show it as 26.4 out of 100,000 instead of .000264? Is it more appropriate to show the statistic one way or the other or can they be looked at the same? Let me know if you have any questions.. we are not very math savvy and the conversation is getting heated, it would be nice to understand why statistics are shown certain ways. For instance sometimes a pie chart makes more sense than putting data into a bar graph. So why would one look at it as a percentage rather than a ratio?


http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/528098789/u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-the-developed-world.


P.S. The US maternal mortality rates look scary to me as a woman, makes me not want to have a kid. My fiancee is trying to say that I shouldn't be that worried. Sorry if I suck at asking the question, statistic questions are hard for me to word.