Editor’s note: This is part 4 of a series about how we can ensure that very young children have the nutrients they need to grow up healthy. Read part 1, Nourish Our Future: The Youngest Children; part 2, Newborn Lives: It Takes a Village; and part 3, Chad: Preparing to Welcome Newborns.
The United States and most other countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The goals include, for example, SDG 2, ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition, SDG 1, ending extreme poverty, and SDG 3, promoting good health for all.
Bread for the World members focus largely on SDG2, but we know that the goals are interconnected. A sustainable end to hunger and malnutrition depends partly on advancements toward the other goals. Among the specific targets in SDG 3 is to reduce maternal mortality.
A woman dies of complications of pregnancy or childbirth every two minutes. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said that the data “highlights how dangerous pregnancy still is in much of the world today.”
World Health Day is celebrated each year on April 7. This year’s campaign focused on improving maternal and newborn health and survival. Significant progress has been made in the past generation. In 2023, the estimated maternal mortality rate was 197 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births (the standard way of reporting such data), down from 328 deaths per 100,000 births in 2000.
But this is still far from the SDG target of 70 deaths per 100,000 births by 2030. The effort has stalled in recent years — so much so that meeting the target would require speeding up progress by literally a factor of 10. Rather than the current estimated rate of progress of 1.5 percent fewer deaths per year, the world would need to reduce maternal mortality by 15 percent each year until 2030.
Experts agree that the COVID-19 global pandemic and its aftermath caused setbacks in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals. Teams of researchers have made painstaking efforts to identify both broad impacts (for example, which consequences of the pandemic will cause most damage in the long run) and specific impacts (for example, how individual countries and demographic groups have fared).
On World Health Day, a group of UN agencies released the report Trends in Maternal Mortality 2020-2023, which included an initial estimate of the pandemic’s impact on maternal survival. In 2021, approximately 40,000 additional women died due to pregnancy or childbirth complications. This was due not only to COVID-19 itself, but also to interruptions in access to maternity services.
This highlights the importance of ensuring access to maternal and newborn care during pandemics and other emergencies. The report warns that currently, there is an emergency of a different kind–recent drastic cuts to humanitarian and development assistance.
As UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell explained, “When a mother dies in pregnancy or childbirth, her baby’s life is also at risk. Too often, both are lost to causes we know how to prevent. Global funding cuts to health services are putting more pregnant women at risk, especially in the most fragile settings….”
The U.S. spent $500,697,000 on maternal and child health programs abroad in fiscal 2023, according to an analysis from health policy nonprofit KFF. A leaked memo from Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, shows that the agency estimated that if programs in maternal health were permanently suspended, 16,800,000 pregnant women in 48 countries would not be reached through life-saving services in the first year alone.
According to the memo, “USAID programs have been pivotal in supporting maternal and neonatal care in low-income countries—from training midwives to supplying essential medicine (like oxytocin for hemorrhage or magnesium sulfate for pre-eclampsia).”
Many preventive measures apply to pregnant women nearly universally, such as making iron supplements available and ensuring that trained birth attendants and emergency medical help are accessible.
Other effective actions to preserve the lives of women and newborns may apply mainly to specific groups. The SDG principle of “leaving no one behind” is helpful in identifying women who might otherwise be overlooked. Perhaps these women are from the poorest families and/or from marginalized religious or linguistic groups in their countries. Perhaps they are child brides who are pregnant before they are physically mature, putting their lives and those of their babies at risk.
The hopeful news is that, despite tragic and discouraging events such as a global pandemic, the world knows what to do, has made progress in the past, and has a framework to enable further progress. We must use all of these to intensify and accelerate efforts to save the lives and health of pregnant women and newborns around the world.
Michele Learner is managing editor, Policy and Research Institute, with Bread for the World.
