Every 90 seconds a pregnant mother dies

RNW, 19 September 2010 - 9:02am | By John Tyler (Photo: ANP)

More than 1,000 women die every day from complications around childbirth or pregnancy - that's one death every 90 seconds. Reducing this number is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and the Dutch government has made it a priority.

(Photo: ANP)

Fatima died giving birth to twins in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her husband Ahmed, a security guard, was left to care for their eleven children.

Cristabalina Santos died in her straw hut in a mountainous region of Panama just hours after her 12th child was born. She developed an infection, and her husband could not find enough people to carry her the three hours it takes to reach the nearest hospital.

Snowball effect

A mother's death has a snowball effect, creating a host of new problems, particularly for poor families already facing numerous difficulties.

These problems include lost income is lost, older children having to take on the role of parenting with the result that they drop out of school, and younger children often also moving out of education as families try to fill the financial gap.

As a result, the spiral of poverty deepens.

Maternal mortality remains an enormous problem in the developing world, where the rates are hundreds of times higher than in industrialised countries. And despite the global attention given to the issue, as one of the Millennium Development Goals, things are not improving quickly.

Positive signal

New figures out this week showed some progress, a 34-percent reduction in fact. But with more than a thousand women still dying each day, it is hard to be optimistic. The target of reducing deaths by 75 percent, compared to 1990 levels, is unlikely to be reached by the deadline of 2015.

Even so, the Dutch Ambassador for the Millennium Development Goals, Christiaan Rebergen, remains upbeat:

"For the first time, we see a first positive signal. The Netherlands has done a lot to bring attention to it. It has always been neglected, but you see the last few years its getting more attention."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will announce a new plan for improving mother and child health during the upcoming three-day Millennium Goal Summit in New York, starting on 20 September.

Budget cuts

But what happens if leading nations in the fight against maternal mortality, like the Netherlands, start paying less attention to the problem?

Nicole Sprokel is a spokesperson for Amnesty International in the Netherlands. She is concerned that budget cuts necessitated by the global financial crisis will have a negative effect.

"Well there is of course the matter of money. Apart from lobbying governments to abide by human rights, there's the fact that countries like the Netherlands should continue to support governments with adequate technical and financial assistance to assure that obstetric care will continue to be available."

New Government

Many here in the Netherlands fear that a new government will slash the development budget.

Christiaan Rebergen remains hopeful, pointing to the fact that funds for addressing maternal mortality worldwide were actually increased in the UK despite drastic budget cuts. But there are fears that the issue will not receive sufficient attention at the New York Summit.

Play it down

Yvonne Bogaarts is spokesperson for the World Population Fund. She says the summit will publish an agreement, the text of which has already been written and says little about maternal mortality.

Sensitivities about the issue of abortion - unsafe abortions contribute to 15 percent of overall deaths surrounding pregnancy and childbirth - are playing a major role in this, according to Bogaarts. She calls this omission scandalous.

Other non-governmental organisations are critical of the Millenium Development Goals in general. Both Amnesty International and Transparency International say governments’ failure to respect human rights and to tackle corruption are slowing down progress toward meeting the goals.

Could have died

At the upcoming summit, leaders will focus on funding and figures. But of course in the end, the Millennium Development Goals are about helping people.

For instance, people like Safura Musah, a mother of eight children in northern Ghana. Safura could have died during the birth of her ninth child. But thanks

to a new ambulance, a mid-wife who referred her quickly to hospital, and a small loan from the local mosque to pay for the ambulance, Safura made it to hospital in time.

She was fortunate to receive the help she needed. But that day, 1,000 other pregnant women weren’t that lucky.

Maternal mortality in Holland

• In recent years, maternal mortality here in the Netherlands has gone up. From 1993 to 2005, 12 mothers died for every 100,000 children born, up from 9.7 in the ten years before that. By comparison, the average maternal mortality rate in Africa is 830 deaths per 100,000 births.
  
  Dutch experts say the higher figures in the Netherlands might be caused by two factors: first, Dutch women are getting pregnant later in life, bringing more health risks. In addition, the number of immigrant women giving birth has gone up. In some cases, immigrants are not sufficiently informed about the health care available to them.
  
  It is not clear what effect the practice of giving birth at home – one in three Dutch babies are born at home - has had on maternal mortality. Official figures indicate it has no effect, and indeed the percentage of home births has not changed that much. The Netherlands has a high maternal morality rate compared to many European countries, but it is almost as high as in France, where most births occur in hospital.

Millennium Development Goals

• At the turn of the millennium, member nations of the UN decided to set themselves a number a targets for making the world better.
  
  They chose eight subject areas, and calculated targets to be met by 2015. The targets use 1990 as the base year to calculate how much things should improve.

192 countries and 23 organisations signed up to:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve Universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality rate by 2/3
5. Improve maternal health - reduce by 3/4 maternal mortality and achieve universal access to reproductive health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases - halt the spread of HIV/AIDS, and by 2010 universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

Links:

• Amnesty International will launch a "maternal death clock" in Times Square in New York on Monday, 20 September.
• United Nations Population Fund has more personal stories on its website
• UN Millenium Development Goal film about Goal 5: reduce rates of maternal mortality

Related Article:

Ban Ki-moon says UN millennium goals 'can be met'

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