It increases the death rate during childbirth in America and Europe

Female mortality during childbirth increased by 17% in Europe and North America 15% in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2016 and 2020, according to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other UN agencies.

Globally, the number of deaths over the same period decreased by 7 percent, from 309,000 in 2016 to 287,000 four years later, or one woman dies every two minutes.

In absolute numbers, sub-Saharan Africa concentrated more than two thirds of these deaths (202,000), while 66,000 were registered in Central and South Asia, 9,400 in the Middle East and the Maghreb, 8,400 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 810 in North America and 590 in Europe (310 in the countries of this).

The report’s author, British epidemiologist Jenny Cresswell, warned at a press conference to launch the report that progress in preventing maternal mortality had been “slow”.

As for the increase in cases in Europe and North America, He believed that this upward trend had already begun before 2016 and attributed it to difficulties in accessing birthing rooms, high costs of social and health insurance and racial inequalities, although he acknowledged that the causes are complex and different in each country.

Compared to these areas, the biggest decline was recorded in Australia and New Zealand (-35%) and in Central and South Asia (-16%).

Cresswell emphasized the particularly vulnerable situation of women in sub-Saharan Africa, where health services for mothers are much less developed, and in nine countries of the region the death rate is double the world average.

According to the report, the main causes of these deaths were internal bleeding, hypertension, infections acquired during pregnancy, unsafe abortions and the presence of serious diseases (such as AIDS or malaria).

In addition, the director of the department for WHO for maternity, newborns, children and adolescents, Anshu Banerjee, pointed out that a third of pregnant women do not receive half of the recommended prenatal examinations and that 270 million of them do not have access to modern family planning methods.

In that sense, the organization emphasized the importance shortens the waiting time for women who will give birth and called on health professionals to provide their patients with “respectful” gynecological care.

To this end, the WHO called for greater investment in this medical field and asked countries to put maternal health at the center of their efforts to prevent the worsening of this situation and thus achieve “no woman dies giving birth to another living being”.