350,000 Missing Mothers
By Lucy Rose Davidoff on 05/09/2011 @ 03:00 PM
This past Sunday we celebrated Mother’s Day. Most of us spent the day honoring the most important women in our lives with flowers, breakfast in bed and phone calls home. But not all children were able to share in the fun. Although Mother’s Day is a joyous occasion it is also a day that shines a light on the risks that women all over the world take when they become pregnant. Over 350,000 women die from pregnancy related causes every year. In some regions of the world as many as one in fourteen pregnant women die in childbirth. In Africa alone, 4.5 million children under the age of 5 and 265,000 mothers die each year. Most of these deaths are avoidable. The United Nations has consistently noted that improving maternal health, Millennium Development Goal #5, is lagging far behind other goals even though in many respects maternal deaths are easily avoided. The three main interventions that are necessary to save pregnant women’s lives are skilled attendants at the time of birth, facilities to provide emergency obstetric care and family planning.
Of these three basic interventions, the most cost-effective (an important consideration in this time of economic challenge), is family planning. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon spoke of the need for increased family planning on World Population Day stating, “Ensuring basic access to family planning could reduce maternal deaths by a third and child deaths by as much as 20 percent, and yet the benefits of family planning remain out of reach for many, especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as the poor, marginalized populations and young people.”
The day before Mother’s Day, Nicholas Kristof wrote an Op-Ed piece called “Mothers We Could Save,” in which he stated, “By United Nations estimates, 215 million women worldwide have an “unmet need” for family planning, meaning they don’t want to become pregnant but are not using effective contraception. The Guttmacher Institute… estimates that if all the unmet need for contraception were met, the result would be 94,000 fewer women dying of pregnancy complications each year, and almost 25 million fewer abortions each year.”
Unfortunately the budget debate in America has centered heavily on cutting family planning services, not only here in America, but as a part of foreign aid as well. But we know the most effective way to slow the rate of maternal death, child death, and abortion is to provide family planning to women everywhere.
Family planning is essential to the well being of women and families everywhere. When a woman can plan her family, she can plan the rest of her life. So this Mother’s Day let’s honor mothers everywhere by providing them the opportunity not only to carry children, but to raise and nurture them as well.
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