There are far too many avoidable deaths in childbirth

In 1934, Kaveri, a 19-year-old girl in Malaya, died of severe bleeding after giving birth to a baby boy. She was my grandmother. My father grew up motherless while my grandfather toiled round the clock in a rubber plantation.

Nearly a century later, the international community has committed to consigning such avoidable deaths to history. Yet progress has stalled, leaving vulnerable women and newborns around the world at the mercy of broken healthcare systems and without access to life-saving medicines.

The evidence is plain to see. A woman dies somewhere in the world every two minutes during pregnancy or childbirth, and each day more than 6,000 neonatal babies die within their first four weeks of life. This unacceptable death toll is especially high in sub-Saharan Africa.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As of 2020, there were around 30 countries where maternal and newborn deaths were still falling, showing that progress is possible. However, mortality rates in the majority of resource-poor countries have stagnated or gone backwards. While the UN’s sustainable development goals set a target of no more than 70 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030, the global ratio remained three times above that level at 223 per 100,000 in 2020.

Read the full op-ed on the Financial Times website.