Background on Maternal Mortality

Hello from the free wi-fi in Delhi's domestic airport, where I have arrived three neurotic hours before my flight and am not yet allowed to check in. I promised some statistics on maternal mortality, but perhaps it isn't the best idea to too scathingly critique anybody publicly at the mo. So a quick overview is just that around 500,000 women die in the world each year as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. For each one of these deaths, 20-30 women are debilitated for life. For example, with obstetric fistula, a woman gets a hole between her bladder and her vagina and becomes incontinent, emitting a powerful odor--then her family will often abandon her.

Access to basic healthcare would prevent most of these situations. From a legal perspective, you can look at the lack of care as a violation by the government, or anyone else who didn't attempt to prevent a given death, of the right to health, the right to life, and the right to equality, which are guaranteed in things such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, binding international treaties, and the Indian constitution.

The cases I've been looking at are really heartbreaking. Most of the women who die or are injured already have anemia, along with tuberculosis or HIV or something else, and throughout 4 or 5 "referrals" among different hospitals 100's of kilometers apart, they're treated with outright hostility and sometimes abused.

The US is not doing so hot in this area, by the way.