Part of the frustration among advocates is that the solutions to the problem are proven and documented. Women need better access to family planning, to a trained doctor or midwife at the time of delivery, and to emergency medical care if complications arise.
Women often experience heavy bleeding after childbirth, and a woman can bleed to death in just two hours, Katia told me. “You might live in a village a day’s walk from the nearest road.”
An estimated 15 percent of all pregnancies have life-threatening complications. In a hospital, a doctor can perform an emergency C-section. But for women giving birth at home, with no medical facility nearby, a complication that would otherwise be considered minor could be fatal. Infection is another common cause of maternal death.
Women in developing countries need greater access to contraceptives, so they can decide how many children they want to have and with whom they want to have them, Katia says, adding, “when women get education, they get smaller families.”
There is a tragic ripple effect when a mother dies in childbirth in a developing country. Often, her children die too, because there is no one to properly care for them.
Experts say maternal deaths could be slashed by one third with access to family planning. Some countries have made improving childbirth survival rates a priority, and they have been able to cut their deaths in half over the past quarter century. Katia cites Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Honduras as examples.
But in the United States, the death rate has gotten worse, not better. Jill Sheffield, who founded Family Care International two decades ago after learning that worldwide, one woman dies from pregnancy every minute, reports that rising obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure put more and more American women at risk. Too many pregnant women lack the health insurance needed to get quality care.
“Poor health care for minority U.S. women is the underlying problem,” Jill writes. “The rate for black women is nearly four times that for white women—34.7 deaths per 100,000 live births versus 9.3.”
