Maternal deaths catastrophic & avoidable: UN
"The scale of maternal mortality is catastrophic. Every minute a woman dies in childbirth or from complications of pregnancy. . . well over 500,000 women a year. 95% are in Africa and Asia. . . This is global health inequality on a shocking scale. For every woman who dies, as many as 30 others suffer chronic illness or disability."
— Paul Hunt, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health
In the developed world, the likelihood of dying in pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in almost 3,000. For women in sub-Saharan Africa the risk is 1 in 16. In Afghanistan, where over 90% of births are attempted without a trained attendant, the death rate from childbirth alone is one in 9.
Women who survive obstructed labour may suffer a fistula, internal tearing that makes urine leak continually from the body. Until the establishment of a dedicated surgical unit at Malalai Hospital in Kabul this month, there was no treatment in Afghanistan for this widespread and devastating disability.
Fistulae and maternal death have similar causes: childbirth without skilled attendants and without access to emergency obstetric care. Ensuring these two critical components of the right to health would cut maternal mortality by 75% (enough to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goal #5).
Child marriage also contributes to these appalling statistics; teenage girls may not be big enough to bear children safely, especially if undernourished. Poverty is certainly a factor, and at times racism, making indigenous women additionally vulnerable the world over.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid (pictured), Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, also emphasises spacing pregnancies. In short, contraception saves the lives of women and children. "Access to voluntary family planning could reduce maternal deaths by 20 to 35 per cent, and child deaths by as much as 20 per cent."
The UNFPA, World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Programme and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are trialling a ‘Road Map for the Reduction of Neonatal and Maternal Mortality’ in African nations such as Mali, Malawi and Burundi. The programme includes access to contraception, skilled assistance at births and quality emergency obstetric and infant care.
Government-led programmes in Egypt and Honduras have halved maternal mortality in a mere seven years. Others sharing responsibility for the right to health include individual families and the international community.
The Road Map hopes to succeed where the Safe Motherhood Initiative of the past 20 years failed, precisely by empowering women, men and their communities to improve maternal health. And by garnering far greater resources for the task, as promised by the international community at the Millennium Summit.
Paul Hunt (left) calls on the human rights community to "remonstrate and demonstrate about maternal mortality just as loudly as it complains about extra-judicial executions, arbitrary detention, unfair trials and prisoners of conscience."
