An international drive to cut the global toll of deaths among women in childbirth has made almost zero progress after 15 years, experts said yesterday.
They blame governments and agencies for seeking a "silver bullet" to solve the problem instead of building up desperately needed local health services.
Anne Starrs, vice-president of Family Health International says, "You cannot give a woman a pill to prevent an obstetric death. You need a fully functioning health system. People have been looking for a silver bullet and it doesn't exist."
Despite The World Health Organisation launching its Safe Motherhood initiative 20 years ago, deaths of mothers in childbirth are almost unchanged since 1990. In 2005, 536,000 women died due to complications of pregnancy or labour compared with 576,000 15 years earlier, according to figures published by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.
Ninety-nine per cent of the deaths occur in the developing world. In sub- Saharan Africa more than 900 women die for every 100,000 live births, a rate 100-fold higher than in Europe.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of UNFPA said: "In this 21st century no woman should die giving life. It is unacceptable that one woman dies every minute during pregnancy and childbirth when proven interventions exist. Millions of lives are at stake and we must act now."
Professor Ken Hill of Harvard University said the "most likely estimate" suggested maternal mortality had declined globally at 0.4 per cent a year since 1990. This was more than 10 times more slowly than necessary to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goal.
He said: "There has been substantial progress in some countries such as Korea and Mexico but in sub-Saharan Africa it is not falling."
Figures show that where women have access to family planning, contraception and abortion, maternal deaths fall by a third and child deaths by 20 per cent.
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
The Independent
