Despite lagging in movement towards securing sexual and reproductive health care, targeting syphilis, and monitoring mothers and their babies in the postpartum period, Uruguay has done much to reduce the maternal mortality rate, a major aspect of the fifth Millennium Development Goal. As alerted to by the IPS newswire the country has made significant progress [...]

According to The New Vision, and as we first alerted to yesterday on Facebook, Uganda has just determined that it cannot and will not allocate 15% of the national budget to health and maternal health care as African Union member states had pledged to do in 2003. Instead of the agreed to percentage, Uganda has [...]

The IPS News wire discusses the multitude of ways mothers in Brazil identify meaningfully with pregnancy, labor, and motherhood depending on cultural expectations and traditional considerations. Attending importantly to the ways that there is never a single way of being a mother, the state National Health Foundation’s (FUNASA) Department of Indigenous Health works to respect [...]

The Unites Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to secure community health and environmental rights and access have not been achieved throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, new UN reports indicate. Proclaiming the moves made by many nations to be “unacceptable” the UN and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) now consider the [...]

In the six months following the disastrous 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti, maternal and neonatal health services have largely been secured again for many of the displaced women and girls throughout the nation. Working alongside the UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, the Haitian government has met the variety of health needs with mobile and [...]

The New York Times just ran an interesting article about how the rising numbers of obese pregnant women are presenting new health and resource challenges, and even leading to entirely preventable maternal deaths, even in the United States.
According to the piece, one in five pregnant women are technically obese. The [...]

The United States is not a great place to be a mother, according to this year’s annual State of the World’s Mothers report put out by nonprofit Save the Children. We came in 28th place out 160 ranked countries, far below leaders Norway and Australia, and behind almost all of Western [...]

One of the major objectives included in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals is to slash the global maternal mortality rate by 75 percent by 2015, but little progress has been made in this direction, according to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
To jump start efforts to improve conditions for women and expectant [...]

Today, British medical journal, The Lancet, published a report that states that maternal deaths have fallen from 526,300 in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008. This is a 35% decrease over the past 30 years.
It has long been reported that little progress has been made in reducing maternal mortality, which is defined as death of a [...]

According to data collected over the last several years, more women got Caesarean sections in 2007 — 32 percent of women who gave birth — than ever before. Today, the operation is the most popular procedure performed in American hospitals. But now experts are concerned about what these numbers mean.
Most health [...]