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Maternal Health and ONE's Policy Plan

How would your administration help reduce the number of women who die unnecessarily in pregnancy/childbirth in developing countries?

The birth of a child should be one of life’s most joyous occasions. And yet, for nearly a half a million women around the world, childbirth becomes a deadly endeavor. For those of us living in a country where only 1 in 2800 women face such a fate, it is hard to comprehend the suffering that viewing childbirth as a potential death sentence can bring. But in Africa, the chance of dying in childbirth is one in 20. For every woman who dies during childbirth, another 30 women suffer injury, infections or disease. As we scale up our efforts to fight headline grabbing diseases, we must remember the consequences of poor health infrastructure and basic health care continue to kill women around the world every day. The global disparity is huge, tragic and unnecessary.

Evidence for Action

Three delays: Maternal mortality is often the result of not recognizing that complications are serious enough to require help, delays in getting to an appropriately equipped treatment center, and delays encountered in starting treatment at a facility because of a lack of health care personnel, equipment or drugs.

Strengthen infrastructure to save lives: For millions of women in the world’s least developed countries, there simply are not health care providers to ensure that they and their future child are born safely; only 56% of births in the developing world are attended by a skilled health care professional. Reducing the gaps in care during prenatal, birth and postnatal care can reduce needless deaths from maternal causes.

Making Motherhood Safe

In recent years, funding for other basic health needs such as maternal health has remained relatively flat. International funding for family planning has declined significantly. The strains on the very health systems that pregnant women need most are being further strained by the toll of AIDS and malaria.

Maternal Health: A Situation too Dire to Ignore

The United States should scale up efforts to address maternal health needs by increasing funding for maternal health and critical child survival programs to $1.6 billion by 2012 and by increasing U.S. support for the improvement of general health infrastructure. An increased focus on maternal health should include a large investment in training and providing skilled health workers to underserved areas so that every woman can have skilled care before, during and after birth.

Key Facts

Motherhood should be a joyous part of one’s life. One in twenty African women dying as a complication to childbirth is a simply unacceptable toll to allow.
Mothers dying and facing long term injuries as a result of pregnancy leave their other children permanently orphaned or temporarily without supervision. Women often provide the food and water that a family needs; without the mother being able to function, these basic needs can be left unprovided.
The solutions to this maternal health crisis – improving health infrastructure and increasing the health workforce – have benefits that will support programs across other health and development issues.

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