Maternal Health
The Safe Motherhood Initiative was launched by the Safe Motherhood Inter-Agency Group, with the goal of reducing maternal deaths by at least half by the year 2000. Nearly two decades later, there has been little or no progress towards achieving this objective. According to the World Health Organization, there were 585,000 maternal deaths worldwide in 1990 compared to 529,000 maternal deaths in 2000. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occurred in developing countries. The country with the highest estimated number of maternal deaths is India (136,000), followed by Nigeria (37,000).Although there is a marked difference in the risk of maternal death between developed and developing countries, safe motherhood is an attainable goal in developing countries. In fact, given sufficient access to essential and emergency obstetric care, safe abortion, and family planning services, most maternal deaths and complications are preventable.
Recently Center for Health Decision Science researchers, including Drs. Goldie and Hu developed a global maternal morbidity and mortality policy model, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, which could serve as an analytic framework and durable policy tool for use in different countries by public health and regional health care delivery decision makers, and which would facilitate understanding the costs and benefits of different strategies for reducing disability and death due to pregnancy-related complications.