WUNRN
Boston Globe
Maternal Mortality - Let's Stop Women's Suffering
By Mary Robinson and Alicia Yamin
June 4, 2009
Many governments are already on board. In March, 85
countries called upon the UN Human Rights Council to take decisive action to
contribute to the existing efforts to address maternal mortality. In this
critical year leading up to the Millennium Development Goal review in 2010, the
council has a historic opportunity in its June session to recognize the need to
incorporate human rights into programs and policies designed to combat maternal
deaths and encourage international cooperation and assistance in this area.
More than one woman dies every minute from preventable
causes in childbirth, and for every woman who dies as many as 30 others are
left with lifelong, debilitating complications. Moreover, when mothers die,
children are at greater risk of dropping out of school, becoming malnourished,
and simply not surviving. Not only is maternal mortality and morbidity a global
health emergency, but it triggers and aggravates cycles of poverty that cause
generations of suffering and despair.
But it is not just a hopeless tragedy. We know what is
needed to save women's lives; we have known for 60 years what care women need
when they face obstetric complications. The reason that women are still dying
is because women's lives are not valued, because their voices are not listened
to, and because they are discriminated against and excluded in their
communities and by healthcare systems that fail to prioritize their needs.
Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, which has just
launched a global campaign to reduce maternal mortality, are calling on
governments to acknowledge that these utterly preventable deaths reflect
widespread indifference to women's suffering and pervasive disregard for their
fundamental human rights.
Yes, saving women's lives will take resources; estimates
are about another $6 billion a year to be on track to achieve the Millennium
Development Goal target and reduce maternal mortality by 75 percent from 1990
levels by 2015. That seems like a pretty cheap price to pay to save hundreds of
thousands of women's lives each year. But 99 percent of maternal mortality
occurs in the global South and especially in some of the poorest countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa.
Asserting that these preventable deaths are an issue of
human rights does not mean that poor governments are going to be blamed for not
doing what they cannot do. Rather, understanding the profound injustice of
disparities in maternal deaths makes it all the more urgent that donor states
honor their funding commitments and that effective monitoring and
accountability mechanisms are put in place to ensure that aid is going to the
interventions that evidence has shown will save women's lives. Moreover,
maternal mortality is a human rights issue within high-income countries as
well, where data show that ethnic and racial minorities suffer
disproportionately from pregnancy-related deaths.
Fourteen years ago at the
Mary Robinson and Alicia Yamin are
advisory council members of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality
and Human Rights.
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