Maz & Kilgore

In some of the world’s poorest countries, women still die in pregnancy and childbirth at what is essentially the same rate as the Middle Ages. Nature seems to have given odds of around 16 to 1 of successfully making it through pregnancy and childbirth without any medical help or modern advances in hygiene. Unbelievably, women in the poorest countries still face this same risk TODAY when entering each pregnancy. What continues to kill these mothers now are exactly the same causes that made childbirth such a dangerous enterprise until the 20^th century – infection, hemorrhage, lack of emergency obstetric care (c-sections), unsafe abortion and eclampsia. The causes are well known (although the percentages remain controversial).

And there’s an additional twist to these figures. When a woman is also denied her rights, her risk more than doubles. In countries where women have no status, out of every 7 woman and girls that become pregnant, 1 will die.

Pregnancy remains the leading killer of women in their reproductive years in developing countries.  According to WHO, the number of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth shows the highest difference between the poor and the rich of any health metric.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under advocacy, maternal health, maz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.