A quarterly international newsletter on sexuality, sexual health, and sexuality education.
Volume 2, Issue 2 - Fall/Winter 2002
Safe Motherhood As a Human Right
Every year nearly 600,000 women worldwide between the ages of 15 and 49 die due to complications resulting from pregnancy and childbirth. That is one woman every minute of every day. For each woman who dies, many more suffer damage to their health.
In addition to maternal deaths, over 15 million women experience severe pregnancy–related complications each year which lead to long-term illness or disability.
The maternal mortality rate is one of the most stark indicators of the widening gap between rich and poor— both within and between countries. For each woman who dies of maternal causes in the developed world, 99 will die in the developing world.A woman in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone has a one-in-seven risk of death during her reproductive years; in Peru, it is one-in-85, in China, one-in-400, and in Norway, one-in- 7,300.
A woman’s death during childbirth, a tragedy in and of itself, represents an enormous cost to her country, her community, and her family.Any social and economic investment that has been made in her life is lost.
The prospects for the more than one million children whose mothers die in childbirth every year are grim—these children are three to 10 times more likely to die before their second birthday.
Research has consistently shown that a healthy mother is the best guarantor of her child’s health. With good health, a basic education, and the opportunity to earn her own income, a mother is more likely and better able to provide these same advantages for her children.
The greatest tragedy is that nearly all maternal deaths are largely preventable. A decade of research has proved that surprisingly small and affordable measures can significantly reduce the health risks that women face when they become pregnant.
For a woman to die from pregnancy and childbirth is a social injustice. Such deaths are caused by social and economic problems such as early child bearing, poverty leading to malnourishment and anemia, unplanned and undesired pregnancy, and lack of access to adequate maternity services and safe, legal abortion.
These factors set the stage for poor maternal heath even before a pregnancy occurs and make it worse when pregnancy and childbearing have begun.
Women, particularly those in poor resource settings, generally lack the power to advocate on their own behalf and influence their own daily lives and life choices. Making motherhood safer, therefore, requires more than good quality health services. Women must become empowered, and their human rights—including their rights to good quality services and information during and after pregnancy and childbirth—must be guaranteed.
Access to services that would make pregnancy safer, such as pregnancy monitoring and the presence of a skilled attendant at birth, is increasingly considered a human right but is systematically unavailable in many countries.
Many health experts fear that health measures alone are not enough to meet the global goals of reducing the enormous maternal mortality rate throughout the world and are turning to a human rights approach to tackle major health issues and look beyond the immediate health concern to underlying socio-economic conditions.
In 1987, a coalition of the world’s leaders in maternal and child health launched the global Safe Motherhood Initiative. It is led by a unique alliance of cosponsoring agencies who work together to raise awareness, set priorities, mobilize research, provide technical assistance, and share information. Their cooperation and commitment have helped governments and nongovernmental partners from more than 100 countries to take action to make motherhood safer.
The Safe Motherhood Initiative has created a publication that looks at ways to apply human rights to safe motherhood called Advancing Safe Motherhood through Human Rights. It is intended as a framework for programs with governments in applying human rights in individual countries.
Advancing Safe Motherhood through Human Rights looks at the many ways human rights, taken alone and in combination with other issues, serve safe motherhood. It addresses strategies for the application of human rights using education and training, negotiation to improve services and conditions, and procedures to enforce accountability among governments and institutions.
The manual is an important step in encouraging professional, institutional, and governmental implementation of the various human rights in national and international laws relevant to the reduction of unsafe motherhood and to enable women to go through pregnancy and childbirth safely.
The Safe Motherhood Inter-Agency Group includes the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the International Confederation of Midwives, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the Regional Prevention of Maternal Mortality Network (Africa), the Safe Motherhood Network of Nepal, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. Family Care International serves as the secretariat.
Resources for more information on safe motherhood as a human right:
Inter-Agency Group for Safe
Motherhood
http://www.safemotherhood.org
World Health Organization, Department of Reproductive Health http://www.who.int/reproductive-health
Advancing Safe Motherhood through Human Rights is available in full text on the WHO web site.
It is also available by writing to:
Department of Reproductive Health
and Research
World Health Organization
1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland
E-mail: rhrpublications@who.int
More documents:
The Safe Motherhood Action Agenda:
Priorities for the Next Decade.
Inter-Agency Group for Safe
Motherhood, 1998.
Family Care International
588 Broadway, Suite 503
New York NY 10012, USA
Phone: 212/941-5300
Fax: 212/941-5563
Web site: http://www.familycareintl.org
E-mail: smi10@familycareintl.org
Safe Motherhood—A Woman’s
Human Right.
Report of the ICM
Africa Regional Workshop, Harare,
Zimbabwe, March 2001. ICM, 2001.
E-mail: info@internationalmidwives.org
Web Master: siecus@siecus.org