Maternal Mortality Rate Drops by 34 Percent Worldwide

A bit of good news for the weekend ... relatively speaking. According to new data, the worldwide maternal mortality rates have dropped significantly this year, by 34 percent worldwide.

The World Health Organization (along with the World Bank, UNICEF, and the UN Population Fund, UNFPA) released a new report on Thursday, Trends in Maternal Mortality, detailing the ways in which some nations are closer to meeting some of the millennium development goals (MDGs). According to the report, women's health has markedly improved in some areas due to increased availability of contraception, better health care facilities, better family planning and pre-natal education, and in some areas, the increased training and availability of care from midwives.

In 2001, faced with grim statistics on global poverty, maternal and child mortality, and environmental destruction, the United Nations set forth a series of eight goals for 2015 to eradicate the most extreme hunger and poverty, improve education, promote gender equality, fight HIV/AIDS and malaria, and improve child and maternal health. Enormous targets, to be sure, the millennium development goals are nevertheless a helpful indicator of just how well the U.N. and international partner organizations are progressing in their struggle against the world's most difficult problems. They also signal that while individual governments may not work to respect and protect women's rights, the United Nations has women's and children's health and well-being at the forefront of their development goals.

But the good news about the global maternal mortality rate comes with some less exciting facts bundled into the data. Not to feel as if we're over the hump yet, sub-Saharan Africa still accounts for 57% of all maternal deaths. South Asia accounts for 37%, and in total, 99% still occur in the Global South. Eleven countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, and Sudan accounted for 65% of all maternal deaths in 2008. Thirty countries have shown no significant change in maternal mortality rates since 1990.

No matter how much money the U.N. is able to direct to programs fighting child and maternal mortality, it's never enough to combat the inequality across regions. While rates dropped in some areas, they remain stagnant in others. Kenyan reproductive health expert Joachim Osur told Inter Press Service that conditions were better in the 1990s. Since then, "The hype has gone down, supplies in hospitals are lacking. The reality here is markedly different from the global reduction on the rate of maternal deaths," he said.

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