Improving Maternal Health
- Target: Reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio
- Target: Achieve universal access to reproductive health
The UN’s goal to reduce the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters made significant advances, having nearly halved since 1990. Women in many regions have no access to skilled health professionals and the care they need while pregnant, increasing women’s risk of dying due to complications during pregnancy or childbirth. Tools to meet the goal involved making sure pregnant women everywhere have access to help, while also educating younger women by promoting contraceptives and family planning.
Ninety-nine percent of women who die from these complications are from developing regions. Poor women are highly unlikely to receive the proper antenatal care and skilled assistance during child birth. These women often suffer easily avoided complications, such as sepsis and hemorrhage. Furthermore, contraceptive use has reduced since the 1990s, leading to more teen pregnancies. One of the leading factors of these maternal deaths is a general lack of knowledge of health issues that can come up during pregnancy, which many groups have addressed by implementing mobile phone programs that either send pregnant women information or connect them to health practitioners.
Funding has considerably decreased during the past decade, from 8.2 percent to 3.2 percent between 2000 and 2008, hindering the ability to continue helping developing regions obtain contraceptives and healthcare.
While in 2010 the estimated number of maternal deaths worldwide was 287,000, 47 percent fewer than 1990 (409,053), the three-quarters target will likely not be met. Sub-Saharan Africa was responsible for 500 deaths per 100,000 births in 2010, followed by South Asia at 220; together, those regions account for 85 percent of maternal deaths in the world.
Nina Mansour is an intern at InterAction.
In the year 2000, after a decade of conferences and summits, the UN created the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a series of eight goals with concrete targets to achieve by 2015. With just three years until December 31, 2015, the world is beginning to evaluate how close we are to achieving the MDGs and to look forward. This eight-part blog series highlights some of the successes and challenges as we close out 2012.
