By Amnesty’s Women’s Human Rights Coordination Group
Next week, we’ll be concluding our Mother’s Day blog series by looking at the international dimensions of maternal mortality. Today we’d like to focus on maternal health as a key to empowering women worldwide.
Globally, motherless children are 10 times more likely to die within two years of their mothers’ death. A mother’s health and nutrition, what care and assistance she received during her pregnancy and delivery determined whether she and you are alive today, and whether you are battling with developmental problems, birth defects, or illnesses, including perinatal HIV.
Every 90 seconds a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications. This is 1,000 women, or more than 2 filled-to-capacity jumbo jets crashing daily. Amnesty International considers this a human rights scandal, not only because almost all of these deaths are preventable, but because they are the culmination of abuses and discrimination against women, from insufficient access to basic healthcare, lack of comprehensive family planning and reproductive healthcare services, early marriages, gender-based violence, to inadequate redress.