Report: 1,000 women die each day from pregnancy-related causes

The World Health Organization is out with a new report that has both good news and bad news for the women of the world, The report, Trends in Maternal Mortality, notes that the number of women dying due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth has declined 34 percent from 1990 to 2008, but that the annual rate of decline is less than what is needed to achieve goals to reduce the deaths by 75 percent by 2015. An annual decline of roughly 5.5 percent is needed to meet the goal, but the current yearly average if just over 2 percent.

The end result is that each day 1,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes.

“The global reduction in maternal death rates is encouraging news,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of WHO. “Countries where women are facing a high risk of death during pregnancy or childbirth are taking measures that are proving effective; they are training more midwives, and strengthening hospitals and health centers to assist pregnant women. No woman should die due to inadequate access to family planning and to pregnancy and delivery care.”

Pregnant women continue to die from four major causes: Severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, hypertensive disorders and unsafe abortion. Out of the 1,000 women that die each day from such complications, 570 lived in sub-Saharan Africa, 300 in South Asia and five in high-income countries.

The risk of a woman in a developing country dying from a pregnancy-related cause during her lifetime is about 36 times higher compared to a woman living in a developed country.

“To achieve our global goal of improving maternal health and to save women’s lives we need to do more to reach those who are most at risk,” said Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF. “That means reaching women in rural areas and poorer households, women from ethnic minorities and indigenous groups, and women living with HIV and in conflict zones.”

Estimates show that it is possible to prevent many more women from dying.

“Every birth should be safe and every pregnancy wanted,” said Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of UNFPA. “The lack of maternal health care violates women’s rights to life, health, equality and non-discrimination. … [W]e urgently need to address the shortage of health workers and step up funding for reproductive health services.”

The report, which was  jointly released Wednesday by the WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Bank, also indicates:

• 10 out of 87 countries with maternal mortality ratios equal to or over 100 in 1990 are on track with an annual decline of 5.5 percent between 1990 and 2008. At the other extreme, 30 of the 87 counties made insufficient or no progress since 1990.
• There is progress in sub-Saharan Africa where maternal mortality decreased by 26 percent.
• In Asia, the number of maternal deaths is estimated to have dropped from 315,000 to 139,000 between 1990 and 2008, a 52 percent decrease.
• 99 percent of all maternal deaths in 2008 occurred in developing regions, with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia accounting for 57 percent and 30 percent of all deaths respectively.
• In the U.S., roughly 24 out of every 100,000 pregnancies ends in death — a figure that has more than doubled since 1995.

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