If we can make maternal deaths as rare as in the healthiest countries, we can save 275,000 mothers each year

Maternal mortality was much more common in the past. It is much lower today, but global inequalities are still large.

For most of human history, pregnancy and childbirth were very risky; mothers would die in at least 1 in 100 pregnancies.1

Since the average woman would have at least four or five children, the lifetime risk of dying from maternal causes would be at least 1 in 25.2 This was true everywhere.

Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. We’ve made huge strides in not only protecting infants in childbirth and the early stages of their lives, but we’ve also made it much safer for women.

But we’re not done yet. There are still huge inequalities in the risks of pregnancy across the world. Pregnant women in countries like Sierra Leone and Kenya are around 100 times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than those in countries like Norway, Sweden, or Germany.3 But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year by closing these gaps.

I’ve compared three scenarios in the chart below to clarify these points.

[...]

[...]

...red more at ourworldindata.org