Chapter 1 - State of Global Health in a Radically Unequal World

Summary

Imagine for a moment a series of disasters that kills more than 800 women every day for a year: the equivalent of two or three daily crashes of crowded long-distance airliners or the equivalent of the direct death toll from the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon every four days. There is little question that such a situation would quickly be regarded as a humanitarian emergency, as the stuff of headlines, especially if ways of preventing the events were well known and widely practiced (as is the case with avoiding crashes in civil aviation). However, remarkably little attention is paid outside the global health and human rights domains to complications of pregnancy and childbirth that kill more than 300,000 women every year – a cause of death now almost unheard of in high-income countries (HICs), although this would not have been the case a century ago. A Canadian woman’s lifetime risk of dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in 8,800; for a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, it is 1 in 36 (Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group, 2015).