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Shine YOUR Light ~ Learn More About Maternal Mortality

Maternal Mortality Each year, about 200 million women become pregnant; for over half a million of them this will kill them. Another 50 million women will suffer long-term disability or illness as a consequence of pregnancy and childbirth. Of all the health measures monitored by the World Health Organization, the largest discrepancy between rich and poor countries occurs in maternal mortality. Most of these deaths could be prevented by providing basic prenatal health care, improving maternal nutrition, and by providing the legal, social and health support that would allow women to avoid un wanted pregnancies. A recent UNICEF report described the global epidemic of maternal mortality this way: “How can such a heavy burden of death, disease, and disability have continued for so long with so little outcry? In part, the conspiracy of silence surrounding this issue is a reflection of the fact that women are conditioned not to complain, but to cope…As one midwife has put it: ‘If hundreds of thousands of men were suffering and dying every year, alone and in fear and in agony, or if millions upon millions of men were being injured and disabled and humiliated, sustaining massive and untreated injures and wounds to their genitalia, leaving them in constant pain, infertile, and incontinent and in dread of having sex, then we would all have heard about this issue long ago and something would have been done’.”


From The Atlas of Women in the World (3rd edition 2003) by Joni Seager, © MyriadEditions.com
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