Maternal mortality rates are falling in every industrialised nation - except for the United States.
The United States is not the first place that springs to mind when considering women dying in child birth. So the fact that two women die of pregnancy-related causes every day may come as a surprise.
According to the World Bank, The United States ranks 50th in maternal mortality globally - falling behind every other industrialised nation. A woman in the US is as likely to suffer a maternal death as a woman in sanctions-hit Iran, and four times as likely as a woman in Germany.
"It is a preventable health issue," said Amnesty International's Rachel Ward. "It isn't something that we're waiting for a cure for. We’re waiting for political will."
What's worse is that US maternal mortality rates may actually be on the rise. Eugene Declercq, of Boston University's School of Public Health, produced a short film named Birth by the numbers, discussing maternal mortality in the US. In a 2013 follow-up report, he noted how mortality rates in other industrialised nations had declined - but in the United States, it increased by thirty percent in the first decade of the new millennium. www.aljazeera.com
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