Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 6:01 pm Post subject: Why are mothers still dying in childbirth? |
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Why are mothers still dying in childbirth?
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| More than 500,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every year in the developing world due to lack of proper care, report Rebecca Seal and Katrina Manson. |
Half a million a year. That's f***en awful. I wonder how many of these poor women got gypped by Bush's aid policies with their anti-abortion agenda.
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It is one of the world's greatest hidden epidemics, but the search for a solution is hopelessly underfunded. On average, every minute of every day a woman somewhere dies in childbirth or pregnancy, the overwhelming majority in developing countries.
It is estimated that they number more than half a million every year, in what Norway's Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, told the United Nations last week was 'the biggest expression of brutality to women I can imagine'.
One of the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals in 2000 was to reduce the ratio of maternal mortality - the number of mothers who die per 100,000 - recorded over the period 1990-2015 by three quarters. But as the 2015 target date gets ever closer, it has become clear that attempts to lower the death toll have failed.
Even as Sarah Brown, wife of the British Prime Minister, became a patron last week of the campaign to reduce deaths in childbirth, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, was conceding how little had been achieved. 'Despite two decades of efforts,' she said, 'the world failed to make a dent.'
Chan was addressing a high-level UN taskforce, whose members - including Gordon Brown, the World Bank president Robert Zoellick and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner - are calling for billions more dollars in aid: $2.4bn next year, rising to $7bn by 2015. 'We still have time, but just barely, to make up for this failure,' Chan added. 'The number of maternal deaths will not go down until more women have access to skilled attendants at birth and to emergency obstetric care.'
With almost 99 per cent of maternal deaths occurring in the developing world, the differences in risk for women in those countries, in comparison with Europeans, are staggering. One in every seven women in Niger will ultimately die of pregnancy-related causes, whereas in Sweden the lifetime risk is one in 17,400.
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